GREENWASHING
Why Advertisers Are Returning to Big Oil Despite Net-Zero Pledges
- Advertising firms are following banks in retreating from net-zero commitments, prioritizing business with Big Oil.
- Financial realities and AI disruption are pushing agencies to secure reliable, high-paying clients in the energy sector.
- The shift highlights a growing gap between climate pledges and industry survival strategies.
Like financial services, advertising and marketing have been at the forefront of the net-zero push, making emission reduction commitments and demonstrating a readiness to pressure the energy industry to decarbonize. Also, like financial services, ad and marketing firms are backpedaling from net zero and eager to get Big Oil’s business.
The Financial Times reported this week that advertisers are going the way of bankers in rephrasing their decarbonization messaging on websites and rediscovering the energy industry as a client - a well-paying one. The standard go-to explanation is, of course, President Trump and his anti-net-zero rhetoric and policies. Yet it seems that a much bigger reason for the pullback is simply money. Like banks before them, advertisers and marketers are discovering that the energy industry makes money and doesn’t mind paying generously for advertising.
The FT cited data from a climate campaign organization called Clean Creatives showing that advertising and PR agencies had boosted the number of contracts with their energy industry clients over the past 12 months. The trend strongly suggests a developing realization that net-zero campaigning is all very well, but it does not really pay the bills. Had it been otherwise, the ad industry—and bankers—would have stopped doing any business with Big Oil.
What actually happened was that banks started pulling out of net-zero organizations. It is a fact that the Trump administration had a lot to do with it, as did Republican state governments before Trump became president. The saga began back in 2022, when Texas passed legislation forbidding state agencies from investing in any of a number of companies that, the state’s government said, boycotted the oil and gas industry. The black list of such companies included many Wall Street heavyweights eager to get a piece of the energy transition business.
Other states also slammed banks and asset managers for their newfound investment pickiness and took measures similar to Texas. Banks and asset managers rushed to defend themselves—even as they continued insisting on their net-zero commitments that inevitably involved a reduction and a following exit from oil and gas. Only it never came to that.
The “reality is that for quite some time, fossil fuels will be with us,” the chief executive of Barclays told Bloomberg last year, even though the bank had made a pledge to completely suspend financing for oil and gas projects—but only new ones. The financial industry, CS Venkatakrishnan said at the time, “cannot go cold turkey” on hydrocarbons.
The pushback against what banks called sustainable investing did a lot to change their perspective on the energy transition—and their fiduciary duty, which is to make money for their clients, not force them to cut their emissions. Now, advertisers are following the same path for pretty much the same reasons. Banks have discovered that investments in emission-reduction, carbon credits, and what transition proponents call climate tech do not pay as well as expected and, indeed, in some cases, it does not pay at all. Now, advertisers are discovering that artificial intelligence is encroaching on their territory and they need paying clients.
According to the FT report—and the Clean Creatives outlet—the ad industry’s rediscovery of the importance of making money has led to a change in marketing messaging for the energy industry that, the report implies, is inconsistent with net zero efforts. “Marketing spend is shifting towards making them seem [oil and gas] inevitable and vital,” the executive director of Duncan Meisel told the FT.
It is a fact that net-zero pundits resent the notion that oil and gas are indeed inevitable and vital for modern human civilization. In fact, some of those pundits acknowledge this, especially those involved in electricity generation. Every winter, the northern hemisphere gets a reminder of just how indispensable hydrocarbons are for securing power and heating once the wind dies down and the sun moves past its peak power generation period.
Ultimately, however, it is about survival. “Advertising is struggling — so all business is being considered,” one industry insider told the Financial Times. AI is turning into a substantial challenge for advertisers and marketers, threatening to render the industry unnecessary. “AI is going to make all the world’s expertise available to everybody at extremely low cost,” Mark Read, the former head of WPP, said earlier this year. “The best lawyer, the best psychologist, the best radiologist, the best accountant, and indeed, the best advertising creatives and marketing people often will be an AI, you know, will be driven by AI.”
In response to that challenge, the ad industry is, first, finding ways to use AI itself, and, two, securing all the business it can secure to ensure its longer-term survival. It so happens that oil and gas majors have the money, and companies such as Ørsted don’t have the money, because oil and gas are indeed inevitable and vital and will remain so until such energy technology is developed that has all the pros of hydrocarbons with none of their drawbacks.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
BP Invests in New $5 Billion U.S. Gulf Oil Project
BP has reached the final investment decision on its estimated $5 billion Tiber-Guadalupe project in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, as part of its strategy to grow upstream production and boost its U.S. output to more than 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2030.
Tiber-Guadalupe, 100%-owned by the UK-based supermajor, will be BP’s seventh operated oil and gas production hub in the Gulf of America, featuring a new floating production platform with the capacity to produce 80,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
Production from the project is expected to start in 2030 and is one of the 8-10 major projects that BP plans to start up globally between 2028 and 2030.
The estimated $5 billion Tiber-Guadalupe project is fully accommodated within BP prudent financial framework, which the supermajor geared toward the upstream business earlier this year in a major strategy reset to slash investments in renewables and focus on its core business of producing oil and gas.
Under the new strategy, BP will aim for 10 new major upstream projects to start up by the end of 2027, and a further 8–10 projects by the end of 2030. Production is also expected to grow to 2.3–2.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (boed) in 2030, with capacity to increase to 2035.
In the United States, together with its 100%-owned Kaskida project, BP expects to invest around $10 billion to deliver its Gulf of America Paleogene projects.
Tiber-Guadalupe and Kaskida will help BP to boost its capacity to produce more than 400,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd) from the U.S. offshore region by 2030. The major aims to increase its offshore and onshore production in the United States to more than 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2030.
“Along with its sister project Kaskida, Tiber-Guadalupe will play a critical role in bp’s focus on delivering secure and reliable energy the world needs today and tomorrow,” said Andy Krieger, BP’s senior vice president, Gulf of America and Canada.
Just last week, BP said that global oil demand is set to rise through 2030 amid weaker-than-expected efficiency gains. In its 2025 Energy Outlook, BP ditched its forecast from last year that oil demand could peak as soon as this year.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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