Shell Greenwashed Natural Gas Using "Carbon Credits" From Project In China That Never Happened
Since 2022, Shell has sold more than 20 cargoes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) as “carbon neutral” under a new industry-led standard. Climate Home News and Dialogue Earth can now reveal that this scheme has relied in part on “phantom” carbon credits that failed to cut emissions as claimed.
The energy giant shipped the fossil fuel to buyers in East Asia and beyond, some of whom in turn pitched the gas as a “net zero solution” to their customers thanks to Shell’s ‘green’ label.
Throughout its life-cycle – from extraction through transport and final use – LNG produces vast amounts of planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane emissions. But, using nearly 5 million carbon credits, Shell claimed to have cancelled out – on paper – the total carbon footprint of at least 23 of its LNG shipments delivered up to the end of 2023. The projects propping up the oil and gas giant’s “carbon neutral” marketing drive included six that claimed to slash releases of methane gas from rice paddies across eastern China.
The emissions – purportedly avoided by introducing an improved crop irrigation method in the region – were meant to offset an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases caused by Shell’s LNG operations. But earlier this year it became clear that the rice cultivation projects had not delivered the promised climate benefits. Leading carbon credit registry Verra axed them – along with 31 other similar schemes – in August after finding a string of failures in their implementation.
Now, new evidence gathered by Climate Home and Dialogue Earth casts serious doubt on whether any emissions-cutting activities were carried out on the ground at all. Chinese local authorities meant to have played a crucial role in the schemes either denied their involvement or said no such efforts had taken place, according to statements made in response to disclosure requests submitted by a risk analysis firm and seen by Climate Home. In addition, Dialogue Earth interviewed three rice farmers based in some of the project areas in China who said they had never heard of the carbon offset programmes and contradicted the project developers’ claims that new irrigation techniques had been rolled out there.
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By the time Verra cancelled the Chinese rice projects, more than 1.6 million credits generated by the projects had been used to offset the equivalent of the annual CO2 emissions of four gas-powered plants, according to a calculator provided by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Shell emerged as the largest single user of the credits. In January, while Verra’s investigation was ongoing, the oil and gas major quietly retired over a million credits issued by the troubled projects. A carbon credit is retired when its owner declares that it has been used to mitigate emissions. At least half of those retired credits helped prop up the company’s “carbon neutral” LNG campaign, according to a document published in June by Shell, which stated that the carbon credits “represent genuine and additional GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions reductions”.
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https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/12/19/shell-greenwashed-gas-junk-chinese-carbon-credits-offsets-phantom/