Creating Sustainable Value
At Stag, we are proud to play our part in delivering resources for energy, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals: key industries which underpin progress in the living standards of Human society everywhere on Earth.
We are also proud of our commitment to deliver these resources in a sustainable way- which means recognizing the impact of Human society on the Earth's Climate and Environment, and working, together with our clients and partners across the Petroleum Industry, towards Carbon Net Zero.
Because there is no Planet B.
Our Statement on Climate Change.
As Petroleum Geologists, we are professional scientists, and have a duty to correctly represent the results of our colleagues in the Climate sciences. As Geologists, we are part of a scientific community which is represented by the Geolgical Society of London, the oldest Geological society in the world and the professional body for British Geoscience. In 2015, the Geological Society, together with 23 other learned societies, published a Communiqué on Climate Change which is fully endorsed by Stag:
The scientific evidence is now overwhelming that the climate is warming and that human activity is largely responsible for this change through emissions of greenhouse gases.
You can read the 2015 Communiqué here. In 2020 the Geological Society released a Scientific Statement which describes what the geological record tells us about our present and future climate. This statement, which can be read here, is also fully endorsed by Stag:
The geological record provides powerful evidence that atmospheric CO2 concentrations drive climate change, and supports multiple lines of evidence that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are altering the Earth’s climate.
Our Action on Climate Change.
Since 2019, we have helped plug more Oil and Gas wells than we have helped drill.
The growth of our Well Decommissioning ('Plug and Abandonment') business means that, in per-well terms, we now typically provide decommissioning services for more wells than those to which we provide drilling services.
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When an Oil or Gas well is decommissioned, it normally still contains hydrocarbons which, if produced, could contribute to the production of greenhouse gasses. In some cases considerable hydrocarbon volumes are left in place, when (for instance) wells are decommissioned not because they are uneconomic but because critical pipeline or processing infrastructure has itself been decommissioned and removed.
Conversely, not every new well drilled can or will be used to produce significant volumes of hydrocarbons. Exploration wells, for instance, are used to discover and not produce hydrocarbons, and even in development drilling there will be the occasional well which produces at disappointing volumes.
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For these reasons, it is not presently possible for us to calculate with certainty the balance between the hydrocarbon volumes which we help to remove from humanity's reach versus those volumes to which we help society gain access. We believe, however, that it is close to equilibrium, and we expect the balance to favour decommissioning as the energy transition continues.
We understand that removing access to potential greenhouse gasses is not the same as balancing emissions with sequestration. We anticipate that our Carbon Storage business will involve us in high-volume sequestration which, over the next decade, will offset potential emissions from our involvement in hydrocarbon production. We believe our CCUS business will help our clients and society to achieve net emission reductions along a 1.5áµ’C trajectory.