Oil Search

Oil Search, now part of Santos following a 2021 merger, was an upstream oil and gas exploration and production company focused on Papua New Guinea. Its core business was the extraction and export of fossil fuels, with its primary asset being the PNG LNG project. As a pure-play upstream operator, the company’s entire revenue and business model were directly tied to the production of hydrocarbons, placing its emissions intensity and climate governance squarely against its sector peers.

The company’s operational footprint was centered on large-scale, long-lived fossil fuel projects. The PNG LNG project, in which Oil Search was a major partner, is a liquefied natural gas export facility with a projected lifespan of decades. This locked in future greenhouse gas emissions from both production and the eventual combustion of the exported gas. There is no public evidence that the company had a credible, science-aligned strategy to transition away from fossil fuel extraction or to mitigate the downstream Scope 3 emissions that constitute the vast majority of its climate impact.

While specific, recent emissions data for the standalone entity is limited due to the merger, the nature of its business model categorically placed it among the most carbon-intensive industrial sectors. Leadership treated the governance of its product’s climate effects as an external matter, with no indication of a plan to wind down its core fossil fuel operations in line with a 1.5°C pathway.