Equinor scraps renewable energy capacity target

By Nora Buli

OSLO, June 16 (Reuters) - Norwegian oil and gas group Equinor has further scaled back its renewable energy ambitions, dropping a 2030 installed capacity target and cutting plans for investment, it said in a strategy update on Tuesday.

The change reflects a wider industry trend, with peers, including BP and Shell, in recent years scrapping ambitions to transition from oil and gas towards renewable energy production.

Equinor, which on Tuesday raised its oil and gas output forecast, dropped the 2030 renewable energy capacity goal and replaced it with an outlook for power generation, which also includes non-renewable electricity production technologies.

"We are not replacing one business with another. Instead, we are developing multiple pathways in parallel: oil and gas, power and renewables, and new low-carbon solutions," Equinor CEO Anders Opedal said in a statement.

It had been clear for several years that Equinor would not reach its target for 10 to12 gigawatts of installed renewable energy capacity by 2030, Opedal told analysts when presenting a strategy update in New York on Tuesday.   

"We never chased it either," he said, adding the ambition had always been to develop a profitable business, but as costs in the renewable energy sector increased, the project pipeline became thinner.

Last year, Equinor trimmed a previous ambition for 12 to16 GW and  to become "an offshore wind major" set in 2020, while also cutting plans to dedicate half its capital expenditure to renewables in the 2030s.

Equinor in 2025 established a division it refers to as its Power business area, which combines its renewable portfolio with gas-fired generation, energy storage assets and trading activities.

Equinor's new plans foresee just 10% of capex going to its power business. It still projects a fourfold increase in power production to more than 20 terawatt hours in 2030, mainly from electricity projects already under construction.     

The company also dropped a target to store and transport 30 to 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2035.

"We have secured enough storage space so we can deliver on that target should the market be there. But we will not run ahead of the market," Irene Rummelhoff, head of Equinor's Midstream, Marketing and Processing business, said.

(Reporting by Nora Buli, additional reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; editing by Terje Solsvik and Barbara Lewis)