Tullow Oil signs US$90 million REDD deal with Ghana
Tullow Oil signs US$90 million REDD deal with Ghana
Another Big Polluter is funding REDD in order to legitimise continued extraction of fossil fuels.
Tullow Oil has announced a partnership with the Ghana Forestry Commission to develop a REDD+ programme. The carbon deal will, according to Tullow, generate up to 1 million carbon credits per year for the oil and gas company.
The REDD+ programme will cover approximately 2 million hectares of land in Bono and Bono East regions of Ghana. According to media reports in Ghana, Tullow could pay about US$90 million over a ten-year period.
Tullow claims that the REDD+ programme will be “high-integrity, jurisdictional based” and that it is “an important milestone on the road to achieve Tullow’s 2030 Net Zero target for Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions”.
These days practically all carbon offset proponents describe their carbon offsets as “high-integrity” to the point where it has become a completely meaningless phrase. And of course, the problem of scope 3 emissions (which is what happens when the oil is burned) is conveniently left out of Tullow’s Net Zero target.
Tullow’s record in Ghana
Tullow’s press release gives the impression that the oil company is a sustainable operation dedicated to addressing the climate crisis:
The primary focus of Tullow’s Net Zero strategy is on decarbonising its operated production facilities in Ghana in order to eliminate routine flaring by the end of 2025. Residual, hard-to-abate emissions, will be mitigated by Tullow’s investment in high quality, nature-based solutions in the form of a REDD+ programme through a partnership with the Forestry Commission of Ghana, which is responsible for the sustainable management of Ghana’s forests and wildlife.
Reading this, we could almost forget that Tullow is an oil corporation that generates its profits from extracting oil.
Tullow is one of the owners of the Jubilee Oil Field, 60 kilometres off the coast of Ghana. The oilfield started production in 2010. In 2023, production reached 100,000 barrels per day.
Tullow’s Chief Executive Officer, Rahul Dhir, said,
“Reaching production of over 100,000 bopd [barrels of oil per day] from the Jubilee field is a major milestone for Tullow, our partners and for Ghana. I look forward to working with our partners to sustain these higher levels of production for several years and to realise the full potential of the Jubilee resource base.”
Drill, baby, drill, in other words.
In 2012, the UK-based NGO Platform wrote about the secrecy surrounding the contracts that Tullow signed with the Ghanaian government:
The contracts were effectively signed in secret without meaningful public or political debate. As a result they included “stabilization clauses” which lock-in weak social and environmental regulations at the time the contract was made. If Ghana passes new laws that set higher standards, it will have to compensate Tullow for the cost of compliance.
Platform points out that gas flaring “produces a cocktail of toxic chemicals such as benzene, that are harmful to the local environment and to human health”.
Tullow and its partners could have put in place the infrastructure to use the gas. They didn’t. Ghana still relies on imports of gas. “Routine flaring” will have taken place for 14 years by 2025, when Tullow promises it will stop flaring as part of its “Net Zero” target.
By 2012, there had already been at least three oil spills from the Jubilee field.
Free, prior and informed consent?
Tullow’s press release states that the project “is expected to positively impact the lives of over 1 million residents by working closely with communities to design alternative economic livelihoods, implement forest conservation and restoration governance structures and create sustainable, long-term employment in the region”.
However, the press release makes no mention of how a process of free, prior and informed consent was carried out with the 1 million people who will be affected by this REDD+ programme.
The latest in a series of carbon deals
Tullow’s signing of the Emissions Reduction Purchase Agreement (ERPA) on 23 May 2024 with the Ghana Forestry Commission is the latest in a series of carbon deals that Tullow has signed in Ghana:
In January 2022, Tullow signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ghana Forestry Commission “to offset more than 600,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year”.
In April 2022, Tullow commissioned Terra Global Capital to carry out a feasibility study.
In March 2023, Tullow signed a letter of intent with the Ghana Forestry Commission.
Tullow’s press release refers to the carbon deal as an Emissions Reduction Purchase Agreement (ERPA), which is a term usually associated with the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF).
In March 2023, Ghana received its first payment of almost US$5 million under the country’s Emission Reductions Payment Agreement with the World Bank. “Subject to showing results from actions taken to reduce deforestation, Ghana is eligible to receive up to $50 million for 10 million tons of CO₂ emissions reduced by the end of 2024,” Pierre Laporte, World Bank Country Director for Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone said.
The FCPF crediting period ends in December 2024. At the Carbon Fund’s 27th meeting in January 2024, the World Bank put forward options for countries involved in FCPF programmes. One of the options is that,
ER [Emission Reduction] Programs transition to ART TREES [Architecture for REDD+ Transactions The REDD+ Excellence Standard] and pursue RBCF [Results-Based Climate Finance] or market transactions via buyers such as LEAF [Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance] or other private sector, CORSIA [Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation], bilaterals with other countries or other routes.
Meanwhile, in January 2024, the Secretariat of the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions announced that it had accepted two documents from Ghana - a registration document and a monitoring report, both for the period 2017-2021.
And in March 2024, the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions Secretariat held a four day series of “stakeholder engagement consultations and training workshops on the TREES Standard” in Ghana.
According to Tullow’s press release,
The programme will focus on c.2 million hectares of land across 14 priority districts in the Bono and East Bono regions, which are among the areas most effected by deforestation due to economic activities such as cash crop clearance and overgrazing.
The deforestation in Ghana is almost entirely in the south of the country. The two maps below show the regions in Ghana on the left, and deforestation in Ghana since 2001 on the right:
According to Global Forest Watch, between 2001 and 2023, Ghana lost 144,000 hectares of primary forest, and lost a total of 1.64 million hectares of tree cover. From 2000 to 2020, Ghana gained 312,000 hectares of tree cover.
Bono and Bono East regions are both included in the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions along with eight other regions in the south of the country.
How could these offsets ever match the emissions from burning all that oil (and flaring)?