A consortium of ten of the largest oil and gas companies in the world promised, Friday – the day when the global Paris climate change agreement came into force – that in the next ten years will invest $1 billion in technologies to combat the global warming, informs Reuters. The initiative of OGCI, led by the general directors of the following companies: Saudi Aramco, Royal Dutch Shell plc, Total, BP, Eny, Repsol, Statoil, CNPC, Pemex and Reliance Industries, inform that it was made an investment fund, called Climate Investments, which will help at the development of technologies of carbon capture and storage and that will help the efforts to reduce the methane emissions of the oil and gas industry. ‘Creating the OGCI Climate Investments shows our collective decision to develop technologies on a large-scale, that will help the fight against the global warming.

Through the collaboration with others, our companies play a key role in reducing the emission of gases with greenhouse effect’, is shown in a press release. However, the announced investments are tiny compared with the commune annual costs of the big oil and gas companies, even if they are facing one of the most difficult periods in the history of the sector. In 2016, the capital expenditure of Shell, Total, BP, Statoil, Repsol and Eni would rise to nearly $100 billion.

The ten firms which together are responsible for approximately 20% of the worldwide production of oil and gas also stated that a ‘large part’ of the one billion dollars will go to the expenditures for introduction of technologies to capture and storage the carbon to the electric power stations based on natural gas. OCGI stated that it selected a list of 200 of the technologies that are related to carbon capture and storage. The critics say that the oil companies have to do more in order to reduce the emissions.