Building a multi-energy company
Our ambition
Our ambition is to be a major player in the energy transition and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, together with society. We have committed to profoundly transforming our production and sales while continuing to meet the energy needs of a growing population.
To do that, we are reinventing and diversifying our energy offering to provide renewable and decarbonised energies to our customers, while continuing to provide the oil and gas they need today.
Oil and gas
Given global demand and the challenges of a just transition, our ambition is to maintain our oil production by 2030. This calls for new projects to be launched to compensate for the natural decline in the fields. We sanction them on performance criteria, notably in terms of technical costs and carbon intensity. We operate our fields with strict safety, emissions reduction and environmental impact requirements. The cash flow generated by these activities is helping to accelerate our investments in renewable energies.
For TotalEnergies, natural gas is a key energy for the energy transition. As a fossil fuel, it emits half as much greenhouse gas as coal when used to generate electricity. This abundant and easily accessible energy source makes it a valuable ally in helping coal-dependent countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
As one of the largest operators in the UK, we operate around 30% of the UK Continental Shelf’s gas production. We are working hard to reduce the greenhouse gases from our North Sea operations to produce hydrocarbons as cleanly as possible, whilst still contributing to the country’s security of energy.
- We were the first major operator in the UK to gain ISO 50001 accreditation for best practices in energy management
- All our producing sites have an emissions reduction roadmap, and we continue to make progress in this area, with a focus on the reduction of flaring, fuel gas consumption and venting
- People working across our sites are fully engaged in the development of these roadmaps and empowered to share their ideas for tackling emissions
In focus: Adjusting our operations to reduce emissions
We modified operations on Elgin Franklin to reduce scope 1 methane emissions which were emitted when removing water from produced gas ahead of export.
The process had involved releasing waste hydrocarbon gas to the atmosphere, known as venting. The modification re-routed the waste gases to the low-pressure flare system to be combusted, resulting in carbon reduction of 84,740 tonnes of CO2 equivalent every year.
Renewable electricity
We are continuing to expand in the renewable energies market (wind and solar), with the aim of becoming one of the world’s top five producers of renewable electricity. Our goal is to produce 100 TWh/year of electricity globally by 2030.
To meet the UK’s increasing energy demand but with lower carbon emissions, we are making major investments in electricity generation from renewable sources. This includes Seagreen, a 1.1GW fixed-bottom offshore wind farm situated 27km off the Angus coast in Scotland which was fully commissioned in October 2023.
We are also developing:
- Outer Dowsing (1.5GW) off the Lincolnshire coast
- West of Orkney wind farm (2GW) off the north coast of Scotland
- Erebus (100MW) in the Celtic Sea
In the solar sector, we are working on multiple projects across the UK amounting to 600MW of power. We are also developing our distributed generation business, working with businesses to adapt their sites to generate their own electricity using photovoltaic panels.
The intermittent nature of solar and wind projects creates a need for flexible generation and storage capacity to meet demand at all times and guarantee grid reliability. For energy storage, we are utilising the technological expertise of Saft, a leading battery company and a wholly owned subsidiary of TotalEnergies. Our goal for 2030? To have 5GW of energy storage capacity deployed worldwide.
Low carbon mobility
We are actively working to make carbon neutrality a shared ambition with our customers. The key to making an effective contribution to the energy transition is to gradually transform the way in which our customers consume energy.
Transport accounted for around 25% of global CO2 emissions in 2021. That’s why we are offering our customers solutions to accelerate the adoption of electric mobility:
- we are developing charging infrastructure, with a worldwide target of 150,000 charging points in operation
- we are upgrading to high-power charging solutions on motorways, with a target of 700 European sites equipped by 2025
- we are producing batteries for electric vehicles
Biomass
Vegetable oils, used cooking oils, animal fats for biofuel production, organic waste for biogas production... Biomass is a renewable energy source of the future, enabling the development of low-carbon molecules. It is now an immediately available solution for rapidly reducing the carbon footprint of mobility and replacing natural gas.
Expanding our biofuels offering
Today, biofuels emit less than 50% of the CO2 equivalent of fossil fuels over their life cycle, and therefore represent a way of decarbonising liquid fuels. Among these biofuels, we favour the manufacture of Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) for decarbonising the aviation sector, while the road sector has options other than biodiesel, such as electricity.
Accelerating in biogas
Biogas, produced by the degradation of organic waste, is a renewable gas composed mainly of methane. Compatible with existing gas transmission and storage infrastructures, it has an important role to play in decarbonising the use of gas products (power generation, heating). We are rapidly gaining momentum in this market. Our objective is to achieve a biomethane capacity of 2 TWh/year by 2025 and 20 TWh/year by 2030 worldwide.
Hydrogen
Hydrogen acts as a gateway between a primary energy source and its end uses. We are interested in the production of more low-carbon hydrogen:
- renewable hydrogen (commonly known as “green hydrogen”), produced by electrolysis using electricity from renewable energy sources
- low-carbon hydrogen (commonly known as “blue hydrogen”), produced by converting fossil fuels, but whose CO2 emissions are captured for reuse or storage, using carbon capture and storage (CCS) processes
To meet our ambition of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, together with society, we are working with our suppliers and partners to decarbonise all the fossil fuel hydrogen consumed in our European refineries and biorefineries by 2030 (commonly known as “grey hydrogen”). This effort aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 3 million tons a year.
We aim to position ourselves as a pioneer in the mass production of renewable, low-carbon hydrogen to meet growing demand. This ambition will be particularly necessary to help decarbonise heavy mobility.
More Energy, Less Emissions
How can we respond to current energy demand while preparing for the future? Our Sustainability & Climate 2023 Progress Report tells you everything you need to know about our multi-energy strategy.