MOSCOW (MRC) -- Saudi oil giant Aramco has excluded emissions generated from many of its refineries and petrochemical plants in its overall carbon disclosures to investors, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.
The world's biggest oil company's self-reported carbon footprint might nearly double, adding as much as 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to its annual tally, if those facilities are included, according to the report.
Much of the omissions are because Aramco chooses to report data from facilities it wholly owns and ones located inside the kingdom, Bloomberg News said, while many of its refineries are joint ventures or located overseas.
Aramco said in a statement that it uses globally accepted guidelines to report the data and has "a clear and deliberate path to increase the scope and details of this disclosure."
The company said it would disclose this year direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions for 2020 from wholly-owned operations in the kingdom and worldwide, subject to verification by a third party.
Aramco's 2019 emissions would have been between 75 million tons and 113 million tons if missing emissions are included, according to Bloomberg News' calculations based on data from a Nature Climate Change study published last year.
Oil major Exxon Mobil Corp, under increasing pressure from investors and climate change campaigners, said in December it planned to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions over the next five years.
As per MRC, top oil exporter Saudi Arabia has cut supplies of February-loading crude for some Asian buyer by up to a quarter while meeting requirements of at least four others. This comes after Saudi Arabia pledged additional voluntary output cuts of 1 million barrels per day (bpd) in February and March under a deal between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies including Russia, a group known as OPEC+.
As MRC wrote previously, Formosa Petrochemical Corporation (FPCC) was running its crackers in Taiwan at 100% capacity utilisation in end-December, 2020. The company"s crackers have combined ethylene production capacity of 2.935 million metric tons/year. Meanwhile, FPCC is planning overhaul of the smallest cracker in mid-2021.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's DataScope report, PE imports to Russia decreased in January-November 2020 by 17% year on year and reached 569,900 tonnes. High density polyethylene (HDPE) accounted for the greatest reduction in imports. At the same time, PP imports into Russia increased by 21% year on year to about 202,000 tonnes in the first eleven months of 2020. Propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) accounted for the main increase in imports.
Saudi Aramco, officially the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, is a Saudi Arabian national oil and natural gas company based in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Aramco"s value has been estimated at up to USD10 trillion in the Financial Times, making it the world"s most valuable company. Saudi Aramco has both the largest proven crude oil reserves, at more than 260 billion barrels, and largest daily oil production.
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