UK Partners With Oil Industry Supplier at COP30

Labour government accused of being “complicit in the fossil fuel industry’s conquest of the COP process”.

The UK government is running its events at the flagship COP30 climate summit in partnership with a major supplier to the fossil fuel industry, DeSmog can reveal.

For the second year running, the UK pavilion is being sponsored by AVEVA, an industrial software firm with hundreds of oil and gas clients – including some of the world’s most polluting companies.

Hosted in Belém, Brazil, the United Nations (UN) summit will attempt to put in place commitments to address the climate crisis and assist the worst-hit countries.

The summit began on Monday (10 November), and the UK pavilion will play host to events featuring politicians, climate experts and businesses in an attempt to showcase the country’s green credentials.

Pavilion partner AVEVA indicated that it had more than 600 oil and gas customers in December 2023, while the “success stories” listed on its website include projects with fossil fuel majors Shell, BP, Chevron, and others.

These testimonials boast of AVEVA’s ability to deploy its technologies to extract more fossil fuels. The firm claims that “by implementing AVEVA software solutions to automate its refinery processes, Kuwait Oil Company is on track to achieve its goal of producing 4 [million] barrels of oil per day by 2030.” 

It also states that, after Shell deployed AVEVA’s software, “the company began to gather operational data at an oil field in the Gulf of Mexico to improve performance of its wells, rigs, and drill floor equipment.”

AVEVA claims to have helped Chevron to boost “asset performance in a declining gas field”, and Italian oil giant Eni to “maximise oil production across sites.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, that it was “absurd” to increase the use of fossil fuels.

The world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has stated that unabated fossil fuels must be phased out as quickly as possible in order to limit global warming to 1.5C. This goal, established by the 2015 Paris Agreement negotiated at COP21, is designed to limit the worst and most irreversible impacts of climate change – including droughts, flooding, and poverty. 

AVEVA’s fossil fuel partnerships also extend to this year’s host country. The company works with Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned fossil fuel giant, which last month received approval to drill in the Amazon basin.

AVEVA’s clients have also included U.S. fossil fuel goliath ExxonMobil, which helped to finance climate science denial in developing countries – including those in Latin America – according to new DeSmog revelations.

“Given that the main culprit behind climate breakdown is the fossil fuel industry, it’s regrettable to hear that the UK is engaging a software provider who has been retained by Petrobras – one of the world’s biggest polluters – and several of its fossil fuel peers,” said Patrick Galey, head of the fossil fuels campaign team at Global Witness.

“We know that Petrobras is planning to expand its oil production more aggressively than nearly every other producer worldwide.

“The UK has the opportunity to show genuine climate leadership at COP30. But partnering with a firm that enables the fossil fuel industry and its vested interests at UN summits poses a serious risk to our government’s climate credibility.”

The UK’s COP30 partners also include the logistics company DP World, which is owned by Dubai’s ruling family in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) –  a petrostate that derives roughly 40 percent of its income from oil and gas.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that clean, home-grown energy is “in the DNA” of his government, and last week joined world leaders in Brazil to insist that the UK is “doubling down on the fight against climate change”.

However, the COP forum has faced mounting criticism over its inability to deliver climate action, and the presence of lobbyists from highly-polluting industries at the talks.

The leaders of four of the world’s five most polluting economies – China, the U.S., India and Russia – won’t be attending this year’s summit, with Donald Trump’s administration lobbying governments, including the UK, to abandon their climate commitments.

“By partnering with a company that has such close ties to oil and gas, the UK government is complicit in the fossil fuel industry’s conquest of the COP process,” said Carys Boughton, Fossil Free Parliament campaigner at Platform.

“Year after year, governments around the world buddy up with fossil fuel interests and gift them special access to this most important of climate conferences, and year after year, the conference fails to agree to the most essential climate action: a phase out of fossil fuels.

“It’s past time for the UK government to wake up to the reality that any company with ties to the fossil fuel industry is never going to be an ally in our collective fight against the climate crisis, and take immediate action to stop these firms from influencing climate policy – at both the international and the domestic level.”

AVEVA referred DeSmog to the Department of Energy and Net Zero, which said: “We have set stringent conditions for companies wishing to sponsor the UK pavilion at COP30.

“Each of the UK pavilion sponsors has demonstrated a strong commitment to climate action, including setting science-based targets through the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) or joining the Race to Zero campaign.”

Cover photo:  Prime Minister Keir Starmer at COP30 in Belém, Brazil. Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street (CC BY 4.0)