COP29 HyCOPrisy

Documents obtained by CEO reveal a concerted lobbying campaign from the European Commission towards senior Azerbaijan officials and its national oil company SOCAR. 

The EU successfully persuaded them to sign up to voluntary methane reductions through the Global Methane Pledge (the oil and gas industry is responsible for large quantities of methane emissions), and to then use COP29 to showcase the new commitment and present Azeri gas as “lower emissions”. 

This would allow gas to keep flowing to the bloc while claiming to conform with EU climate targets.

“While publicly proclaiming its own fossil fuel phase-out, the EU is hypocritically using COP29 to drive Azerbaijan’s gas expansion and whitewash its human rights abuses in the name of domestic energy security.”  Pascoe Sabido, researcher and campaigner, Corporate Europe Observatory

Key findings include:

• EU lobbying on the Global Methane Pledge, a voluntary scheme based on industry self-reporting, ramped up after Azerbaijan was announced as COP29 hosts. Overcoming Azerbaijan’s initial scepticism, it has become key in the preparations and during the talks;
• The EU sold the Global Methane Pledge to Azerbaijan as a financial opportunity, with members “rewarded by the market” thanks to EU ambitions “to establish a global market for lower-emission oil and gas”, with buyers choosing supplies “based on environmental impacts”;
• The EU offered to support and co-organise prestigious high-level events on the Global Methane Pledge at COP29, telling Azerbaijan it had a “great energy story to tell”, ignoring the associated human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing;
• The Task Force (TF3) organising many of the EU’s COP29 activities is the same one securing new gas supplies for the bloc after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including from Azerbaijan. This means meetings to discuss COP29 activities also discussed gas supplies, with SOCAR present on multiple occasions;
• The EU’s rebranding of Azeri gas can also be seen in the recent undercover sting of COP29 chief executive, Elnur Soltanov, who discusses “sustainable oil and gas investments”;

The EU’s climate hyCOPrisy is all over the UN summit. EU negotiators have a mandate to support the “phase out of fossil fuel energy production and consumption globally”, and outside the negotiating rooms the EU is organising a Ministerial on the phase-out. Yet at the same time it is pushing Azerbaijan and other countries to increase production to meet EU needs, locking them into decades more fossil fuels and impeding their own clean energy transitions.

For media inquiries, please contact

Pascoe Sabido, researcher and campaigner

pascoe@corporateeurope.org - +44 44 7969 665 189

Marcella Via, press officer 

media@corporateeurope.org  - +39 348 4201435

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Notes to editor

• To read the full report, click here
• Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU and Azerbaijan signed an MoU to double the exports via the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) from 10 to 20 billion cubic metres per year by 2027. Azerbaijan says it will increase production by a third, with President Aliyev stating it is “because Europe needs more”.
• Methane is a potent greenhouse gas more than 80 times worse for global heating than carbon dioxide over a 20 year period, and is released in large quantities when drilling, transporting, and storing fossil gas, meaning using it can be worse for the climate than coal. 
• The EU and the US launched the voluntary Global Methane Pledge at COP26 in 2021, aiming to reduce methane emissions 30% by 2030. A key element is the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership (OGMP) 2.0, a voluntary self-reporting framework for the industry which has come in for harsh criticism.
• In December 2023, the Environmental Investigation Agency said the GMP “is not delivering”, while methane levels in the atmosphere “have continued to rise at unprecedented rates”