Why scope 1, 2 and 3 aren't the same argument

"The Green Shift" — the February 2023 final report of the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas's Energy Transition Advisory Committee (ETAC) — opens its oil-and-gas chapter with a distinction that quietly does most of the work in every major's climate pledge: scope 1+2 emissions (what a company burns and leaks on its own sites) run to roughly 4% of global CO₂ emissions, about 1,600 million tonnes a year. Scope 3 — what customers burn after buying the fuel — is more than five times larger, at roughly 8,400 million tonnes a year, around a fifth of the global total, once product combustion is counted. Within the industry's own operations, upstream extraction contributes 40–50% of emissions and refining another 30–40%. Every net-zero pledge that follows has to be read against which of these three numbers it actually covers.

The pledge board: twelve companies, one table

ETAC's Exhibit 1.7 lines up decarbonisation targets across three tiers of the industry — International Oil Companies, National Oil Companies, and downstream players — pulled directly from each company's own disclosures. The report doesn't editorialise; it just puts the dates and scopes side by side, which is revealing enough on its own.

Source: Exhibit 1.7, "The Green Shift," ETAC/MoP&NG (2023), citing company reports. Scope coverage varies by company — several targets shown are scope 1+2 only, with no disclosed scope 3 commitment; see the report for the full scope-by-scope breakdown.

Oil and gas has the weakest commitment rate of any sector ETAC checked

The report's companion exhibit (1.8) turns the pledge board into a single number: of the world's 20 largest oil and gas producers — together roughly 54% of global production — only 10 have committed to net zero or climate neutrality by 2050, covering 54% of the group's combined output; 36% carry lesser "other climate commitments," and 10% carry none at all. Set against the other hard-to-abate sectors ETAC checked, oil and gas comes last: 13 of the top 20 steel producers and 13 of the top 20 airlines have net-zero commitments, covering 81% and 79% of their respective sectors' production; vehicle manufacturers are close behind at 12 of 20 (68% of production). Oil and gas majors are pledging less, and covering less of their own sector's output, than every other industry the same report benchmarks.

Where India's own producers fit in

ETAC's chapter on Indian companies reads less like a pledge and more like a construction schedule. ONGC, working with IOC, is building India's first industrial-scale carbon capture project at the Koyali refinery: CO₂ captured there is compressed and piped to ONGC's Gandhar oil field in Gujarat, injected into a depleted reservoir for enhanced oil recovery, with an estimated 5–6 million tonnes of CO₂ sequestered by 2040 and a projected 10% gain in oil output from the same wells. ONGC has separately signed an MoU with Equinor — the Norwegian major named in this blog's earlier piece on Where India's Captured Carbon Would Actually Go — to work jointly on CCUS, offshore wind, and green/blue hydrogen. The Koyali–Gandhar project is one concrete answer to a question that piece left open: which named basin actually gets a well first. It also slots directly into the ₹20,000 crore national CCUS Mission sized in How India Actually Plans to Hit Net Zero.

ETAC's own company profiles go further than the Koyali–Gandhar project and put a number on every major Indian producer's net-zero pathway — each one framed against its own operational-emissions baseline rather than a shared benchmark year, which is worth reading as a table on its own.

Source: ETAC company profiles, "The Green Shift" (2023) — ONGC p.34, OIL India p.37, IOCL p.40, BPCL p.43, HPCL p.46, GAIL p.50. Baselines are each company's own reported net operational (scope 1+2) emissions in the stated fiscal year; none of the six PSU baseline years match each other, so the absolute MMTCO₂e figures are not directly comparable across rows without adjusting for company size and baseline year.

Two things stand out reading this table against Exhibit 1.7. First, IOCL's 2046 target actually beats every international major's stated date except Reliance's 2035 — on paper, India's largest refiner is committing to net zero faster than Shell, bp, or TotalEnergies. Second, three of the six PSUs (ONGC, GAIL, HPCL) explicitly scope their pledge to 1+2 only, either flagging scope 3 as a separate, softer commitment (GAIL's −35% by 2040) or not mentioning it at all — the same scope-narrowing this piece flagged in ExxonMobil's and Chevron's global targets above. Oil India's "to be firmed up" is the most candid entry on either table: rather than naming a date it doesn't yet have evidence for, it discloses a decadal reduction schedule (5% by 2030, rising to a cumulative 40% by 2060-70) and stops there.

The quieter carbon play: biogas's fertiliser exhaust

A detail buried in ETAC's biofuels chapter doesn't show up in any net-zero exhibit at all. IOCL alone has issued 2,247 Letters of Intent (5.5 MMTPA capacity) to entrepreneurs for Compressed Biogas (CBG) plants under the government's SATAT scheme, with 18 already commissioned — including a 100 tonnes/day cattle-dung plant in Jaipur and a 200 tonnes/day paddy-straw plant in Gorakhpur. What the report flags as a near-term priority isn't the gas itself, though — it's the leftover: IOCL is explicitly "creating a business vertical for manure marketing in India," enriching the fermented organic manure (FOM) that CBG plants produce as a byproduct using additives from in-house R&D, and selling it through IndianOil retail outlets, NAFED, and Farmer Producer Companies. That is the same digestate-to-cropland pipeline covered in this blog's Bio-Fertiliser and Green Credits — except here it is arriving through an oil company's fuel-retail distribution network rather than an agriculture-ministry scheme, which says something about who India is actually counting on to build this supply chain at scale.

Sources and caveats