TotalEnergies CEO defends oil and gas strategy after climate protests

The chief executive of TotalEnergies defended the firm’s greenhouse gas emissions strategy, saying the company remains committed to oil and gas despite repeated warnings that increasing fossil fuel production will only make matters worse.

Speaking to CNBC’s Dan Murphy in Vienna, Austria on the sidelines of an OPEC conference, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanne said Wednesday that the company had allocated nearly one-third of its capital expenditure to low-carbon technologies, with the remainder spent on oil and gas.

“We are in both pillars, and we will remain on both pillars [for a long time],” Pouyanne said.

“Today, our society requires oil and gas … Why we are together, it is 80% of fossil fuels. There is no way to think that overnight we can just eliminate all that and rely only on 10% of low-carbon energy. It will take decades to build a new system,” he added.

“So, we must do two things: To continue to produce the oil and gas, [while] of course being very strict on the emissions. The question is not fossil fuels, it is emissions, to lower the emissions.”

His comments come just over one month after French riot police fired tear gas at hundreds of climate activists trying to prevent the firm’s annual general meeting. Activist groups had pledged to try to stop the shareholder meeting from taking place to denounce the group’s fossil fuel expansion plans.

The burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and gas, is the chief driver of the climate emergency. The world’s leading climate scientists, collated by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have said tackling the crisis requires “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors.”

The IPCC’s message, which was approved by governments across the globe, underscored the need for a substantial reduction in fossil fuel use to curb global heating, now at 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

U.N. chief Antonio Guterres, meanwhile, has warned that investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is “moral and economic madness” and such investments will come to be seen as “a blot on the landscape and a blight on investment portfolios.”