French multinational energy company TotalEnergies is one of the world's six or so supermajor oil companies, which are often colloquially referred to as Big Oil. Now, the company says it has come up with a way to reduce the amount of methane that is released into our atmosphere — by using drones, TotalEnergies itself reported.
Methane is a gas that has heat-trapping capabilities up to 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term. It is produced in large quantities by animal husbandry, particularly by cows. It is also used as an energy source, usually being referred to in that context as "natural gas."
TotalEnergies, the company says, halved its own methane pollution between 2010 and 2020. Its goal is to achieve net-zero methane pollution by 2030. In order to accomplish that goal, it worked with the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne to develop "a drone-mounted ultralight CO2 and CH4 sensor for ensuring access to hard-to-reach emission points while delivering readings with the highest precision."
The company wants to "develop an unmanned drone navigation system with data automatically streamed to the servers, as well as instantaneous data processing and reporting capabilities." By doing this, the company will be able to deliver immediate results to operators.
But, as TotalEnergies is the fourth-biggest oil company in the world (according to 2023 net income reported by the Natural Resources Defense Council), this initiative could be viewed as an act of greenwashing — the practice in which polluting companies attempt to win over the public by pretending to care about the environment (or perhaps making efforts that pale in comparison to their impact).
In 2022 alone, TotalEnergies generated more planet-overheating gases than the entire country of France, accounting for almost 1% of global pollution, according to company data cited by LeMonde.
The actual figures could be even worse than that. According to calculations by Greenpeace France, TotalEnergies' carbon pollution could be almost four times higher than what the company self-reports.
Dirty energy — particularly, the mining, refining, and burning of petroleum — is the single sector most responsible for the ongoing overheating of our planet, which has led to increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events, the melting of glaciers, rising sea levels, and a host of other environmental problems.
Of course, TotalEnergies has known this since the 1970s and has been accused of pushing misinformation in order to secure its shareholders' profits ever since, as the BBC detailed in 2021.
"Total personnel received warnings of the potential for catastrophic global warming from its products by 1971, became more fully informed of the issue in the 1980s, began promoting doubt regarding the scientific basis for global warming by the late 1980s, and ultimately settled on a position in the late 1990s of publicly accepting climate science while promoting policy delay or policies peripheral to fossil fuel control," according to a study published in the journal Global Environmental Change.
There is certainly still room for optimism — that this development is a step in the right direction and that people (and legislators) will hold TotalEnergies to account and prevent it from causing even more harm.
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