Renewable Energy Sources in Decarbonization: The Case of Foreign and Russian Oil and Gas Companies

Abstract

The necessity of implementing the Sustainable Development Goals and solve the problem of climate change, technological progress and the conscious climate policy of many countries has led to the transformation of the world economy and power industry towards low-carbon development, which should be based on renewable energy sources. Oil and gas companies are actively criticized by the international community for contributing significantly to total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, with emissions from hydrocarbon fuel combustion being the largest. In order to meet the tightening environmental requirements and regulations, oil and gas companies implement various initiatives for decarbonization and reducing the carbon footprint, including operating with renewables, whose scale, essence and variety depend on the decarbonization model. This paper attempts to identify, first, how renewable sources of energy have been integrated into the oil and gas companies; second, what decarbonization models are possible; and third, what the major determining factors in the formation of their decarbonization model and the scale of renewable usage are. Based on an extensive literature review, survey, websites and corporate sustainability reports of Russian and foreign oil and gas companies, models of decarbonization and the role of renewables in decarbonization are defined and the classification and interpretation of determining factors are offered, justifying their impact on the decarbonization model and the scale of renewable usage. The authors present an assessment of factors and prove the correlation between the factors under consideration and the scale and diversity of renewable usage by oil and gas companies, confirming the adequacy of the offered approaches.