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urgewald
Ahead of COP30, Report Finds Oil and Gas Expansion Continues to Outpace Climate Action
"While the Loss and Damage Fund sits almost empty, oil and gas companies are investing more than $60 billion each year into new exploration," said one campaigner.
Nov 04, 2025
The fossil fuel industry is "racing toward climate breakdown with its foot on the accelerator," said one official at the German environmental rights group Urgewald on Tuesday as the group released its Global Oil and Gas Exit List.
The report shows that as world leaders prepare to meet in Brazil for the annual United Nations climate summit, any discussion they have there regarding a green transition is being undercut by massive expansion in oil and gas extraction and production, including in the fracking and liquefied natural gas (LNG) industries.
Four years after the International Energy Agency (IEA) stated that no new oil and gas fields have a place on a pathway to limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C—marking global energy experts' public endorsement of warnings that had come from climate scientists for years prior—96% of fossil fuel firms are exploring and developing new oil and gas resources, said Urgewald.
Short-term expansion is up 33% since 2021, when the IEA issued its warning, with fossil fuel giants planning to bring 256 billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent (bboe) into production in the coming years.
Five companies account for about one-third of global short-term expansion: QatarEnergy (26.2 bboe), Saudi Aramco (18.0 bboe), ADNOC in the United Arab Emirates (13.8 bboe), Russian state-owned entity Gazprom (13.4 bboe) and US firm ExxonMobil (9.7 bboe).
Nils Bartsch, head of oil and gas research at Urgewald, said the largest fossil fuel companies in the world "are treating the Paris Agreement like a polite suggestion, not a survival plan."
The analysis comes a decade after 195 countries signed the legally binding Paris Agreement, committing to develop and implement national climate action plans to draw down fossil fuel emissions.
"With 256 billion barrels of new projects on the table, this is not a transition—it is defiance," said Bartsch.
The Paris Agreement also included a demand for wealthy countries to contribute funds to help the Global South mitigate and adapt to the climate emergency, and annual UN conferences have addressed climate finance, but the industry is still spending about 75 times more on oil and gas exploration than governments have pledged to the UN Loss and Damage Fund, according to the report.
On average, companies listed in the Global Oil and Gas Exit List (GOGEL) spent an average of $60.3 billion over the last three years on oil and gas expansion.
“Brazil is showing an alarming level of climate hypocrisy—presenting itself as a climate leader at COP30 while allowing oil and gas expansion right at the summit’s doorstep, threatening one of our most fragile ecosystems."
The US has pledged just 17.5 million to the Loss and Damage Fund, while two of its biggest fossil fuel companies, Chevron and ExxonMobil, have spent $1.3 billion and $1.1 billion on oil and gas exploration, respectively, in the last three years.
"While the Loss and Damage Fund sits almost empty, oil and gas companies are investing more than $60 billion each year into new exploration, exacerbating the problem the fund is meant to alleviate. This is financial and moral negligence. Regulators and supervisory authorities need to start treating this as a risk, not a footnote," said Fiona Hauke, oil and gas researcher and financial regulation expert at Urgewald.
The report was released a week before world leaders are scheduled to meet in Belém, Brazil for the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), even as state-owned fossil fuel company Petrobras begins drilling in Foz do Amazonas Basin in the fragile, biodiverse Amazon rainforest.
Petrobras was named in GOGEL as the 15th largest fossil fuel exporter worldwide, currently spending $1.1 billion annually searching for new reserves, as Brazil prepares to host a meeting that is meant to focus on implementing emissions reduction plans.
“Brazil is showing an alarming level of climate hypocrisy—presenting itself as a climate leader at COP30 while allowing oil and gas expansion right at the summit’s doorstep, threatening one of our most fragile ecosystems,” said Nicole Oliveira, executive director of the Arayara International Institute in Brazil.
GOGEL also pointed to oil and gas expansion in the US under the Trump administration, with the US overtaking China as the number-one developer of gas-fired power even as a recent UN and World Bank report found that nine out of 10 renewable energy projects are cheaper than even the lowest-cost fossil fuel alternatives.
The US is home to the largest LNG export developer worldwide, Venture Global, as companies are planning an export capacity of around 847 million tons per year—a 171% increase from current operational capacity.
Urgewald noted that even TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné recently acknowledged that the LNG sector is "building too much."
"Analysts warn that if current plans proceed, the world could face an oversupplied gas market within five years, with far more capacity than global demand can absorb," reads GOGEL. "Yet despite industry leaders acknowledging the risk, investment continues."
"US fracking companies are producing far more gas than they can sell domestically," adds the report, noting that the country is turning to Mexico as an export platform. "Now faced with a flood of excess gas, companies are racing to build new LNG facilities to liquefy their surplus and push it onto countries around the globe."
Pablo Montaño, director of Conexiones Climáticas, Mexico, said new LNG projects "are not for the benefit of Mexicans."
"They will import fracked gas from the US, liquefy it in Mexico and send it straight to Asia. Gas liquefaction is an incredibly dirty business," he said.
Despite clear warnings from energy and climate experts, said Cathy Collentine, Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign director at the Sierra Club in the US, "fossil fuel expansion continues to put communities and the climate at risk."
"Under the Trump administration," she said, "we are seeing a disregard for both to do the bidding of Big Oil and Gas."
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Report Names Institutions Behind $4.3 Trillion in Climate-Wrecking Investments
"Investors need to draw a red line on fossil fuel expansion and they need to do it now," said an author of the report, which cites Vanguard and BlackRock as the largest institutional investors in fossil fuel companies.
Jul 09, 2024
Institutional investors including the Vanguard Group and BlackRock collectively own $4.3 trillion in the stocks and bonds of fossil fuel companies, according to a report released Tuesday by Urgewald, a nonprofit based in Germany.
Urgewald and partner nonprofits tracked investments into nearly 3,000 companies in the coal, oil, and gas sectors for Investing in Climate Chaos 2024, a report that follows on similar research they published last year.
The $4.3 trillion in financing jeopardizes the quick phaseout of fossil fuels that's necessary to avoid unmanageable climate breakdown, the report says.
"If institutional investors continue backing companies that are still expanding their coal, oil, and gas operations, it will be impossible to phase out fossil fuels in time," Katrin Ganswindt, Urgewald's head of financial research, said in the report. "Investors need to draw a red line on fossil fuel expansion and they need to do it now."
🆕 Investing In Climate Chaos reveals top investors in coal, oil and gas.
👉 Discover who they are & the full report:https://t.co/ix94o84YtT
📢 Calling on all investors to stop all forms of financial support (bonds, loans...) to companies developing new fossil fuel projects. pic.twitter.com/VsRmXD41tl
— Reclaim Finance (@ReclaimFinance) July 9, 2024
Urgewald looked at the holdings of more than 7,500 institutional investors worldwide including "pension funds, insurance companies, asset managers, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds, and asset management arms of commercial banks" as of May 2024.
The true investment total may be higher than $4.3 trillion, given the lack of transparency in bond markets; the report authors estimated that they only included 20-30% of actual bond holding in fossil fuel companies.
Of the $4.3 trillion, more than half was invested by U.S.-based companies. In fact, $1.1 trillion was held by just four companies: Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street, and Capital Group—dubbed "the filthy four" by Urgewald—each of which had more than $160 billion in fossil fuel investment holdings.
Alec Connon, co-director of Stop the Money Pipeline, said the outsized role of the U.S. was the result of poor governance.
"This mirrors the complete lack of action by U.S. regulators to effectively monitor and address the climate and transition risks of large institutional investors," Connon said in the report. "This inaction lays the ground for the next economic crisis and puts the world on a fast track towards climate chaos."
Nearly $4 trillion of the $4.3 trillion in holdings went to companies that are actively developing new fossil fuel projects, not just tapping existing projects, though the report doesn't specify how much actually went toward new development; many companies do both.
In any case, it's clear that new development abounds: Companies have increased capital expenditure on oil and gas exploration by more than 30% since 2021. ExxonMobil, among the biggest beneficiaries of the institutional investing documented in the report, alone spends $1.4 billion annually searching for new reserves in 37 countries, the publication says.
All of this is in spite of pledges to "transition away" from fossil fuels, as countries agreed to do at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai in December. Environmental campaigners are trying to use those pledges, loophole-ridden as they may be, to pressure institutional investors and regulators to take action.
"The question is, will institutional investors continue snapping up bonds of companies like Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, or TotalEnergies whose business model relies on heating up the planet?" the report's authors asked. "Or will pension funds, insurers, and asset managers realize that these investments will produce more heatwaves, more catastrophic floods, more climate disasters?"
Urgewald is one of the NGOs that produces the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report, the latest publication of which found that big banks shoveled nearly $7 trillion into fossil fuel companies in the eight years after the Paris agreement was signed in 2015. That report, released in May, showed that major banks including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup together financed fossil fuel companies to the tune of $705 billion in 2023, the hottest year on record.
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Fossil Fuel Firms 'Building Bridge to Climate Chaos'
An updated database shows that more than 1,000 oil and gas companies around the world are planning to expand their planet-wrecking infrastructure.
Nov 15, 2023
More than a thousand fossil fuel companies around the world are currently planning to build new liquefied natural gas terminals, pipelines, or gas-fired power plants even as scientists warn that fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with efforts to prevent catastrophic warming.
That's according to an updated database released Wednesday by Urgewald and dozens of partner groups. Described as the most comprehensive public database on the fossil fuel industry, the Global Oil & Gas Exit List (GOGEL) covers 1,623 companies that are operating in the upstream, midstream, or gas-fired power sector and collectively account for 95% of global oil and gas production.
The updated database shows that 1,023 are plotting expansions of fossil fuel infrastructure, threatening to lock in years of planet-warming emissions as extreme weather
fueled by the climate crisis wreaks havoc worldwide. The World Meteorological Organization said Wednesday that global greenhouse gas concentrations reached a new high once again last year.
"The magnitude of the industry's expansion plans is truly frightening," said Nils Bartsch, Urgewald's head of oil and gas research. "To keep 1.5°C alive, a speedy, managed decline in both oil and gas production is vital. Instead, oil and gas companies are building a bridge to climate chaos."
According to the 2023 GOGEL, 96% of the 700 upstream oil and gas companies in the database are exploring or actively developing new oil and gas fields, projects that Urgewald said "severely jeopardize efforts to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 °C."
Nearly 540 companies in the database are collectively planning to produce 230 billion barrels of oil equivalent (bboe) over the short term, the database shows.
"The seven companies with the largest short-term expansion plans are Saudi Aramco (16.8 bboe), QatarEnergy (16.5 bboe), Gazprom (10.7 bboe), Petrobras (9.6 bboe), ADNOC (9.0 bboe), TotalEnergies (8.0 bboe) and ExxonMobil (7.9 bboe)," Urgewald noted. "These seven companies are responsible for one-third of global short-term oil and gas expansion."
The database also shows that fossil fuel companies are planning to expand global LNG capacity by 162%, a significant threat to critical climate targets. A United Nations-backed report published last week warned that fossil fuel expansion plans are "throwing humanity's future into question."
Urgewald pointed specifically to the LNG boom in the U.S., which the group said is "cementing its position as the world's largest export hub for LNG" with 21 new export facilities planned along the Gulf Coast. Those facilities account for more than 40% of worldwide LNG expansion documented in the GOGEL database.
"Most of the fossil gas that will be exported from these terminals stems from the Permian Basin, the heart of the U.S. fracking industry," Urgewald observed.
The updated database shows that nearly 80 companies—including Exxon, Chevron, and BP—are currently operating in the Permian Basin, located in the U.S. Southwest.
Climate campaigners and experts have also sounded alarm over Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), a planned $10 billion LNG export hub that would ship up to 24 million tons of gas annually once it is completed.
"The fossil fuel industry wants to pave undeveloped wetlands all along the coast with LNG facilities like NextDecade Corporation's Rio Grande LNG Terminal, Rebekah Hinojosa, a member of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network said Wednesday. "Besides their environmental implications, these plans violate Indigenous sacred lands, and people working in fishing, shrimping, and eco-tourism risk losing their jobs. Our communities refuse to be sacrificed for the fracking industry's dirty gas exports."
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