In so doing Watson has broken ranks with six of Europe’s largest oil and gas companies, including Royal Dutch Shell and BP, who wrote to the UN last week to ask it to let them help governments devise a global carbon pricing plan to combat global warming.
“It’s not a policy that is going to be effective because customers want affordable energy. They want low energy prices, not high energy prices,” he reportedly told an Opec seminar in Vienna on Wednesday, according to the Financial Times.
“I don’t think that putting a price on carbon is necessarily the answer. I’ve never had a customer come to me and ask to pay a higher price for oil, gas or other products.
“We did not sign that letter and we don’t intend to.”
Watson suggested Europe would be better off if it sped up shale gas development and stopped closing down nuclear power plants.
He reportedly said that he understood concerns about climate change and Chevron had taken many steps to address them.
“I am not aware of a company that has done more to address greenhouse gas emissions than my company,” he said.
“We are the largest renewables producer among the major oil companies. We have 50 per cent of the largest carbon storage project in the world.
“For policy makers to have as the premise for their strategy to combat greenhouse gas emissions raising the cost of energy worldwide for the people who can least afford it is, I think, not a policy that is going to be effective because customers want affordable energy.
“If we are serious about climate change, nuclear power would be on the agenda. We wouldn’t be shutting down nuclear plants around the world.”
Watson, Chevron’s gas and midstream president Pierre Breber and Chevron Africa and Latin America president Ali Moshiri described the super-major’s bullish approach to growing its LNG business in Paris.
“With projects under construction at Gorgon and Wheatstone, along with our existing equity shares at Angola LNG and the Northwest Shelf, we expect to become one of the top 10 LNG suppliers in the world within the next five years,” Watson said.
“This growth in our LNG business will help Chevron reach its target of 3.1 million barrels of oil equivalent production per day in 2017 – a 20% increase from 2014 production levels.”
Watson’s comments also highlighted Chevron’s dogged drive to continue to be a major player in the LNG market, in the face of a major play by rival super-major Royal Dutch Shell to ramp up its own LNG game.
Shell chief financial officer Simon Henry said in April that the UK super-major would sell about 50 million tonnes of LNG a year by the end of the decade when combined with takeover target BG Group.
This is twice as much LNG as Chevron and ExxonMobil.
“We become the largest private LNG company in the world, and by a factor of two,” Henry said.
With more LNG projects on the horizon, “we’ll have a leading position in the market for many years to come.”
For its part, Chevron will be starting up Gorgon, one of the biggest projects it has even undertaken, this year, quickly followed up by Wheatstone next year – and Watson was talking up the US player’s rising stocks in the LNG game on the European majors’ turf.
“The $90 billion investment in these two Australian natural gas projects, as well as our first sour-gas processing plant in China's Chuandongbei, underline Chevron's commitment to this fuel source,” Watson said of LNG.
“Natural gas is rising to about 40% of our portfolio from about 35% 10 years ago. Yet meeting demand will take much more than these efforts.”
With Wood Mackenzie projecting global LNG demand to nearly double by 2025 reaching about 440MMt, Watson said the world would need more than a Gorgon-sized project each year for nearly 10 years to meet projected demand.
The Gorgon LNG facility is to supply just over 15MMtpa.
“The growth of our LNG business is timely, and geographically strategic, as demand is projected to be particularly strong in Asia-Pacific, aligning with Chevron's major LNG projects,” Watson said.
The Chevron executives pointed out that with the US Energy Information Administration projecting global energy demand would increase as incomes rise and the middle class grows, major portion of that growth will come from natural gas – much of it delivered to market as LNG.
“Industry will have to come up with new and innovative approaches to ensure the necessary infrastructure is built,” Watson said.
This push for innovation and forward-thinking by the oil and gas industry reflects comments made by Woodside Petroleum CEO Peter Coleman at APPEA 2015 last month, when he said the sector could not just assume to be the one to provide the developing world with energy when coal is hot on its heels, despite its back being against the wall.
While the CEOs of European majors Shell, Total, Statoil, BG Group and Eni called on the UN and world governments to adopt a carbon price as they see gas as being the future of a world increasingly in need of cheap, environmentally palatable energy as opposed to coal, Watson appeared to have taken a more open-minded approach.
In noting that the world added three-quarters of a billion people to the middle class over the past 10 years, Watson acknowledged coal had its role to play in the global energy mix, given there was still about 1.4 billion people who still have no access to electricity. A billion more only have access to unreliable electricity networks.
While he said the North American shale boom lowered carbon dioxide emissions as industry replaced coal with natural gas in power generation, Watson added that in the years ahead, “the world is going to need all forms of energy – natural gas, crude oil, coal, renewables and nuclear – to meet global energy demand”
