In Great Britain, the international engineering company Wood Group expanded its oil and gas business and reduced RES projects after receiving a government loan for a green transition of about $536 million.
The environmental community has been outraged by such greenwashing and has accused the government's scheme of being abusive to polluting companies, The Guardian reports.
It said Wood grew its oil and gas business by 17%, pushing earnings to more than $3 billion, up from $2.6 billion in 2021. In addition, the company reduced the size of its renewable energy, hydrogen and carbon capture business units by 35%. The company also announced the sale of its environmental protection consulting division to the Canadian company WSP Global for $1.8 billion.
The five-year loan was the first of its kind and was designed to help Wood transition away from fossil fuels. It was announced by then-International Trade Secretary Liz Truss in August 2021.
The Guardian noted that after receiving the loan, Wood announced 20 major contracts for oil, gas and petrochemical infrastructure.
"This demonstrates that in at least one case the government's Transitional Export Development Guarantee Scheme has facilitated greenwashing. It should not be possible for a company to receive a green transition loan and then double down on the expansion of its fossil fuel business." said Robin Well, a representative of Fossil Free London.
The loan was guaranteed by UK Export Finance (UKEF), the government's lending agency, which said in August 2021 that Wood had committed to increasing its clean growth case and significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions over five years.
Under the terms of the UKEF, in order to be eligible for the loan, a company must demonstrate that it is actively moving away from fossil fuels and, if it does not meet specific environmental targets, it will have to pay an increased interest rate on the loan.
Earlier, Ecopolitic wrote, that the oil giant Exxon Mobil significantly reduced the support of the biotechnological company Viridos, which has been working on the production of biofuel from algae since 2009 and has achieved considerable success.
As EcoPolitic previously reported, an anonymous survey conducted by Harris for Google Cloud found that 58% of CEOs worldwide and 68% in the US said their companies were guilty of greenwashing.
