The project is supported by the Bertha Foundation

There are now at least two lawsuits in the US–in Pennsylvania and Hawaii–involving the spread of climate crisis disinformation by oil and gas companies. In both cases, the defendants are the global corporations British Petroleum, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell. Yet only one case also involves the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association of which these energy companies are members. Such trade associations, according to the lawsuit, are “paid hirelings” who have carried out media campaigns to discredit climate science. The oil and gas corporations also sponsored researchers to raise doubts about climate science and the extent to which human activity contributes to climate change.

Companies and scientists then shared their research with anyone who could influence public opinion. They told consumers, politicians, the public, other scientists and business leaders about how climate change is linked to the use of fossil fuel products. Or not.

The defendants deny the accusations, claiming the lawsuit is politically motivated.

The Great Deception

In April 2024, a scandal erupted in the United States: upon receiving $25 million in donations from Shell, a multinational oil corporation, Louisiana State University allowed the sponsor to influence its research. Why would a company want to control the content of research?

Shell explicitly states that it “benefits from working with leading academic research institutes and universities”. That is why it funds research to develop technologies that, in the company's opinion, will contribute to overcoming the climate crisis.

The company's spending on projects that “contributed to decarbonisation” reached almost $628 million in 2023 alone. In Shell's logic, money should be invested not primarily in the development of clean energy sources such as wind and solar, but in carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies, hydrogen production from natural gas, and emissions offsets.

It is this technological direction that would allow energy companies not to curtail production, which would disrupt production operations and therefore lead to a loss of profits. Alternatively, hydrogen could be used, which is already released as a by-product of oil or natural gas refining.

Hydrogen, indeed, is a by-product of oil or natural gas refining. However, the use of “grey” or “blue” hydrogen (derived from fossil sources) leads to CO₂ emissions unless CCUS is used.

CCUS is a technology that allows capturing carbon dioxide released during oil production or energy generation and burying it deep underground so that it does not enter the atmosphere.

At the moment, CCUS is an experimental technology with high costs and ambiguous long-term effectiveness. There are also risks associated with storing CO₂ underground, including potential future leaks.

But are these technologies actually effective?

On one hand, environmentalists regularly perform studies, showing that enormous volumes of methane can leak from natural gas wells and pipelines as well as that carbon capture failed in several large-scale trials.

On the other hand, the prospects of this technology are recognised by the International Energy Agency (IEA), a leading lobbying organisation for green technologies and decarbonisation with 29 member countries, which is criticised by both oil and gas operators and OPEC.

The IEA's canonical report Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector, CCUS technology is recognised as one of the key elements in the combat against climate change.

Meanwhile, oil and gas companies widely manipulate the actual results of the technology appliction in their information campaigns. With reference to data from the Centre for Climate and Energy Research, Exxon Mobil claims that carbon capture and storage can neutralise more than 90% of CO₂ emissions from power plants and industrial facilities.

But this data was found to be incorrect after being reviewed by the US Department of Energy. The study by the Centre for Climate and Energy Research mentions 90% carbon capture as part of the description of the NRG Petra Nova project in Texas, USA. But the US Department of Energy found that the company captured even less than the planned 17% of carbon emissions. Due to constant equipment breakdowns and plummeting oil prices, the project was closed after three years of operation.

By the way, this project cost $1 billion. Including $190 million in funding from the US government.

The 90% figure was then disseminated not only by oil and coal giants and CCUS organisations, but also by the aforementioned IEA and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, under whose auspices international environmental conventions are concluded.

So why has this disinformation been so successful in getting around the world?

Billions for research

Climate disinformation, or shifting research focus in some cases, helps oil and gas companies continue to reap super-profits. That said, according to the financial statements of the world's largest energy companies, a tiny fraction of their revenues is required to fund research–less than 2% of net profit on average, as the author estimates.

In other words, energy companies' funding of scientific research on various topics that divert the focus from the true causes of climate change slows down global efforts to combat climate change. It also erodes public confidence in the scientific evidence and solutions to the climate crisis.

ExxonMobil is one of the leaders in investing in environmental projects. The company spent about 11% of its net income on them in 2023. That was more than $4 billion. The same amount includes research expenditures.

ExxonMobil co-operates with over 80 universities around the globe. Industry players and scientists they fund argue in their research that carbon capture can be an important tool in meeting global climate goals. For example, research on CO₂ storage was done at Stanford University and the City University of New York.

“These collaborations have increased knowledge in key (!) areas important to the energy transition: fugitive methane emissions detection and modelling; optimization techniques to understand CO₂ storage; electrification of processes; lower-emission fuels; and energy systems models,” the company says in its climate report.

Thousands of academics working directly for ExxonMobil also seek “improved ways to store CO₂”. The corporation boasts that its researchers have written more than 1,000 peer-reviewed publications over the past decade.

The aim of this multimillion-dollar investment is to undermine the credibility of scientific facts. Almost always, the money is granted to scientists who hold unusual, rarely-heard views to oppose conventional scientific opinion. This makes it seem as if scientists do not have a unified position on climate change, when in fact most agree that the climate is changing due to human activity.

We have only a part of the data on the scale of research sponsored by the oil and gas industry. Scientists do not always disclose their sources of funding.

China's largest oil and gas corporation, China National Petroleum Corporation, does not publish detailed reports on how much money a particular scientist or laboratory has been paid for research. The only amount related to science that we managed to find in the company's 2023 financial report was $250 million for the construction of research facilities.

All we know is that CNPC has been conducting joint research on carbon capture and storage technologies with Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's national oil company, which is the world's largest oil company in terms of production and reserves.

One can imagine the amount of money spent on research itself, judging by the number of scientists CNPC works with. This is more than 30,000 researchers. CNPC claims that these people work in the corporation's in-house research institutes and laboratories–they number 159.

The company also runs joint research with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University. This means, in fact, virtually the entire academic community of a multi-billion nation.

Distractionary tactics

Compared to other top oil and gas operators in the world, Rosneft allocates much more modest amounts for environmental research. For example, in 2023, it was more than $3 million, or 0.02% of annual net profit. Why so little?

Leading researchers’ average salary in russia is around $605. This is 26 times less than a scientist in the United States. Such low salaries allow russians to finance a significant amount of research even with a small budget. Having monitored the company's public reports and its official website, we discovered information about 38 scientific institutes whose research Rosneft has funded in recent years.

What do scientists research for the polluter's money?

The international scientometric database Scopus has 555 studies carried out by 258 Rosneft researchers in collaboration with scientists from independent academic institutions since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015 and until 2024. Nearly all of them are about studying energy in terms of oil and gas production. Among the scientific articles, we did not find any that even dealt with carbon capture technology or other alternative “clean” energy sources, such as solar or wind power.

What kind of research does Rosneft present as environmental?

The company produces oil in the Arctic zone. And oil production is always accompanied by environmental pollution. But have the scientists of the Arctic Research Centre, a specialised Arctic research centre, conducted any studies on the impact of oil production on the environment and climate jointly with Rosneft's “scientists”?

The corporation's version of important environmental studies does not cover this topic. We did not find any such study among the 48 joint papers. There are, instead, plenty of thorough papers on the impact of iceberg shape on wind force, morphometry and mass of icebergs in the russian Arctic seas, and large-scale experiments on crushing ice with an icebreaker.

There is no joint research funded by Rosneft on the negative impact of the oil and gas industry on nature with other research institutions. However, together with researchers from the russian Academy of Sciences, they have written articles on the impact of anthropogenic neighbourhood on bacterial and fungal communities in polar bear faeces and the structural evolution of Mesozoic complexes in Western Chukotka.

This is what a tactic of distraction from an important issue looks like.

Double dealers

Rosneft conducts joint research not only with independent academic bodies, but also with other major oil companies. Rosneft's experts co-authored 51 scientific articles in Scopus with representatives of the BP (formerly British Petroleum). And none of them covers the topic of energy efficiency or green technologies.

While Rosneft is only planning a study on carbon capture, BP has been working on this subject for a long time.

BP has co-authored more than 2,000 documents in the Affordable and Clean Energy section (see examples of publications here, here, here). The corporation has carried out joint research with 150 academic organisations. The largest number of collaborations were with world-renowned scientific and educational organisations: Imperial College London (223), University of Cambridge (134), Beaver College (103).

A BP researcher, together with three researchers from Chevron Corporation, Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA), and Cenpes Research Centre (Brazil), wrote an article on carbon capture projects in 2021.

In the article, the authors analysed a large portfolio of CO2 capture and storage projects. “In this paper, we reflect upon the highlights and lessons learnt from twenty years of investment in technology development and the implications for the future deployment of CCS.,” the article's abstract reads.

So why are academics from independent institutions eager to do joint research with the world's major polluters? 

Harvey E. Goodman, one of the co-authors, represents both Chevron and Los Alamos Laboratory.

The laboratory organises collaborations with energy companies on a regular basis, as it believes that this will enable “fundamental scientific discoveries”: "By partnering with energy industry leaders, we develop energy sources with limited environmental impacts and improve the nation’s energy infrastructure security, reliability, and efficiency."

And Cenpes studies the same areas of decarbonisation, including CCUS and hydrogen, that BP, Chevron and other oil giants do.

51 joint studies were conducted with British Petroleum by Northwestern University in Illinois, USA. Eric Masanet was engaged in research on carbon capture and storage technology on behalf of this university. The scientist is a very influential and media-friendly personality. He talks a lot about his research at conferences and in the mass media.

Eric Masanet heads a laboratory that looks for ways to reduce energy consumption in industry. He wants these innovative tools to be used by oil and gas corporations and politicians. For instance, he has assessed the potential for carbon capture in the US oil refining. In that paper, he calls carbon capture "a critical technology for climate change mitigation".

"The results shown in this study provide an intuitive and quantitative understanding of the potential of CC technology to reduce CO2 emissions from the U.S. refining industry," the paper's abstract says.“ Such information is helpful to policymakers, oil companies, and energy/environmental analysts for strategic planning and systems design to manage future CO2 emissions of refineries."

Has Mr. Masanet's research work influenced the thinking of other scientists? It has, as it has been cited by scientists in 19 other Scopus scientific papers.

Masanet's influence is further enhanced by the fact that he is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), a powerful non-governmental organisation that has influenced US energy policymaking since the 1980s.

ACEEE staff work closely with the US Congress to help shape new initiatives and analyse the impact of energy and climate policy proposals. They are involved in the federal budget process, encouraging and increasing funding for what they believe to be the most effective energy efficiency programmes.

No wonder why another influential expert, Joe Cresco from the US Department of Energy, who is also focused on industrial decarbonisation, has been doing joint research with such an influential scholar. Together they analyse the use of CCUS technology for the oil and gas industry.

In this study, Masanet and Cresco describe ongoing and completed CO₂ capture projects “to develop legislative and policy frameworks and to promote public understanding”. In simple terms, this is a guidebook that explains how to implement the technology in legislation and convince society that this technology is highly needed and important.

But Masanet's opinion has the greatest effect on international climate policy, as he is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international organisation that has a great influence in the climate movement. This very organisation prepares annual reports with recommendations on how to mitigate the effects of climate change. The group's 2022 report identifies the main options for reducing emissions from the energy sector as upgrading power plants so that they can capture and store CO₂ emissions instead of releasing them into the atmosphere and banning coal plants that do not use carbon capture technology.

So the main point boils down to the fact that CCUS is extremely important to develop, one way or another.

Energy companies do not only fund research directly. Research grants can be provided by organisations that include oil and gas companies.

An army of speakers-for-hire

In order to get more voices and platforms for disseminating disinformation, oil and gas operators create their own organisations or join existing ones: trade associations, business unions, climate initiatives, etc. To maximise their influence on these bodies, they fund them or include their representatives in their membership.

“ExxonMobil’s participation often includes taking leadership positions on trade association boards, policy committees and technical work groups, which provide valuable opportunities to learn from others and share our positions and principles," ExxonMobil's climate report says.

The company is at present a member of 56 such organisations, some of which (12) it sponsors. This means that it can affect the activities of each of them. In total, in 2021–2022, ExxonMobil financed 127 organisations. And almost half of them were identified by the company as potentially influential in the discussion and development of climate policy.

"We encourage our trade associations to constructively support for cost-effective, technology-neutral emission-reduction policies that will help society achieve a net-zero future," ExxonMobil says.

As a result of the company's efforts in recent years, several trade associations in which ExxonMobil management has held executive roles, such as the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have taken positions that are more aligned with ExxonMobil's climate change views.

These associations then study specific topics and propose certain changes to legislation so that energy companies can benefit financially. In doing so, they want to shift the burden of financing low-carbon technologies to the government.It is therefore not surprising that in 2022, ExxonMobile paid the largest amount–over $7.5 million–for lobbying on energy and environmental issues to the API, the main US oil and gas NGO which includes representatives of about 400 oil and gas corporations.

The API believes that CCUS is key to "cleaner energy use in the economy" (which is not true). That is why they are trying to influence politicians to produce legislation that will enable oil and gas companies to make money from this technology. The organisation has also included in its action plan to ensure that the state pays for research into low-carbon technologies, including carbon capture and storage.

Simultaneously, the API leadership has been pushing the narrative that a clean energy system of the future is impossible without oil and gas. These messages often contain misinformation.

Here's how Steven Comstock, Vice President of the American Petroleum Institute, reacted to the International Energy Agency's report on the path to zero emissions by 2050: "Any pathway to net zero must include continued innovation and use of natural gas and oil, which remains crucial to displacing coal in developing nations."

And in his address to the US Department of the Interior, API Vice President Kevin O'Scannlain emphasized that the US is a global leader in both emissions reduction and energy production "thanks to the innovation and vitality of the US oil and natural gas industry".

"Policies aimed at slowing or halting oil and natural gas production on federal lands and waters will ultimately prove harmful to our national security, environmental progress, and economic strength," added Mr. O'Scannlain.

These two statements were made in 2021. Two years later, API continued to push this narrative. In its address to the US Senate leadership, it again referred to increased use of natural gas as the main reason for reducing emissions in the US energy sector.

"Natural gas attributes are fundamental to power grid reliability, especially as variable energy sources such as wind and solar come on. Between 2005 and 2019, natural gas was responsible for 61% of cumulative power-sector CO2 emissions reductions through changes in the fuel mix,” the statement read.

In 2024, responding to the Presidential Administration's possible refusal to ship natural gas abroad, API CEO Mike Sommers also said that "one of the best things we can do for the environment is to send more U.S. LNG overseas to displace coal and help cut global carbon emissions."

Such statements first appear on the ARI website and are then disseminated in the mass media that focus on the energy sector.

"The science is clear: Using natural gas instead of coal significantly reduces emissions, including air pollutants and CO₂," Anchal Liddar, senior vice president of API's Global Industry Services, which is responsible for training, publications and safety programmes for industrial operations, writes on hartenergy.com, being quoted by API. This author's publications appear on the portal on a regular basis–there are already 15 of them.

In fact, however, according to the IEA, clean energy is at the heart of this slowdown in emissions: without the increased deployment of five key clean energy technologies since 2019 - including solar, wind and electric vehicles - emissions would have risen three times as much.

Global impact

Chevron, one of the world's largest energy companies, has admitted that it has influenced the climate principles of the Business Roundtable, a well-known US lobbying association whose members include CEOs of major US companies.

And now, the list of these climate principles contains a call for economic pricing of carbon as the main (!) policy-making tool to address climate change and support carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS).

Why is this beneficial for Chevron? Because BRT lobbies for government policies that are favourable to business.

Similarly, Chevron considers it an achievement to have changed the position of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers trade association, forcing it to accept the idea of carbon pricing.

The oil and gas sector generously finances such associations. For example, Chevron mentions in its report that it transferred $100 million to the so-called Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) Climate Investments. This organisation "contributes to the conversation on climate change".

The OGCI declares its purpose to be the voice of the industry's response to climate change and to accelerate action for a "net-zero future consistent with the 2015 Paris Agreement".

That said, the organisation prioritises only a few ways to reduce emissions: CCUS and cutting methane emissions. Therefore, it is these solutions that OGCI promotes in political circles, "supporting governments in developing appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks" and "incentivise public acceptance".

Part of OGCI's money is used to fund projects at academic institutions. For example, OGCI donated about $1 million to the Payne Institute for Public Policy for research on tracking gas flaring data.

OGCI frankly calls its actions propaganda, considers it appropriate, and states that all its lobbyists should be trained and educated on agreed positions and how to present them.

One of the organisation's stated goals is to identify and remove obstacles to the deployment of carbon capture and storage technology. To make CCUS profitable for the oil and gas sector.

Summing up the results of its work in this area over the past ten years, OGCI says that the role of CCUS in addressing the global decarbonisation challenge has grown significantly.

"In the years that OGCI has been working on CCUS, the landscape has changed significantly," they say. "A decade ago, the technology was generally viewed as an expensive way of decarbonising the power sector and it was struggling to attract support as the cost of using renewables to generate power fell. And there was little collaboration across industries, policymakers and other stakeholders on policy frameworks and business models."

As the OGCI believes, it is thanks to their work that leading institutions, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency, now acknowledge the importance of CCUS in reducing carbon dioxide emissions and achieving zero net greenhouse gas emissions in a cost-effective way.