COP31 host Turkey's TPAO expands oil and gas plans sevenfold - Urgewald

Turkey's state oil company TPAO has expanded its oil and gas plans sevenfold since 2021, German campaign group Urgewald said on November 10, as Antalya hosts the COP31 climate summit.

Turkish Petroleum (TPAO) is now developing 1.98bn barrels of oil equivalent (boe), making it the world's 11th-largest state-owned oil and gas developer, and its exploration spending has doubled over the past five years, according to the 2026 edition of Urgewald's Global Oil & Gas Exit List (GOGEL), released on the summit's energy and transport day. The database covers around 1,900 companies across exploration, production, transport and power generation, and some 300 financial institutions use it to screen their portfolios.

The figures put the host country's own national oil company at odds with the talks it is staging. Turkey won the right to hold COP31 under an unusual compromise that left Australia chairing the negotiations, and the summit is due to take forward work on a fossil fuel exit roadmap. At home, Ankara is racing to cut its import bill: the Osman Gazi floating production unit set sail on October 17 to double output from the Black Sea Sakarya gas field.

Since the start of 2026, TPAO has signed agreements with ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and TotalEnergies to explore for new oil and gas at home and abroad, Urgewald said. They include a memorandum with ExxonMobil covering the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, signed in Istanbul on January 8, a deal to join Shell in Bulgaria's Khan Tervel block in February, and a preliminary agreement with TotalEnergies on the Turkish Black Sea shelf in April.

"Fossil fuels are by far the largest contributor to the climate crisis," said Signe Moe, a senior research analyst at Urgewald. Turkey's push to step up exploration and development "taints the country's leadership role at COP 31", she added.

State companies lead the rush

TPAO is part of a wider industry push. Some 96% of upstream oil and gas companies are still exploring for or developing new reserves, and state-owned companies dominate the short-term expansion rankings, according to the report.

QatarEnergy leads with plans to bring 27.5bn boe into production over the next few years, followed by Saudi Aramco with 16.8bn boe, Russia's Gazprom with 13.7bn boe and Abu Dhabi's ADNOC with 13.5bn boe. ExxonMobil is the only private company in the top five, with 11.7bn boe. The figures measure resources the companies intend to bring into production within roughly one to seven years, not their annual output.

"These companies are betting on decades of oil and gas sales that are far from guaranteed," Moe said, warning that investors are left "exposed to the risk of stranded fossil fuel infrastructure as the energy transition accelerates".

Majors overshoot the IEA pathway

GOGEL measures how much of each company's planned expansion falls outside the International Energy Agency's original net zero by 2050 scenario of 2021, which left no room for oil and gas fields beyond those already approved that year.

ExxonMobil's overshoot of that pathway has grown by 195% since 2022 to 10.8bn boe, the largest of any international major. TotalEnergies overshoots by 5.7bn boe, Shell by 4.8bn boe, Eni by 4.3bn boe, BP by 3.6bn boe and Equinor by 3.4bn boe. BP shows the biggest relative increase, at 238% since 2022. The six have spent a combined $39bn on exploration since 2022.

All six presented net zero by 2050 plans between 2020 and 2022 and have since weakened or dropped most of them. Their expansion plans were incompatible with the 1.5C limit long before they began discarding those targets, according to Urgewald.

Russia in the LNG race

Of the 873mn tonnes a year (t/y) of new LNG export capacity planned worldwide, nearly half, or 434mn t/y, is in the US. Venture Global alone plans 84.4mn t/y, followed by QatarEnergy with 57.8mn t/y and Russia's Novatek with 49mn t/y, ahead of Cheniere Energy with 37.7mn t/y and Mexico Pacific Holdings with 30mn t/y.

Novatek's existing Arctic output is still finding European buyers despite the EU's phase-out: the bloc imported a record 12.18mn tonnes of Yamal LNG in the first nine months of 2026, according to an earlier Urgewald analysis of shipping data.

The export build-out depends on Asian demand that may not arrive. Asia accounts for two-thirds of planned global LNG import capacity, but the supply disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's chokepoints, have exposed importers to sharp price shocks and could speed a shift to electrification and renewables. China's new five-year plan for oil and gas foresees an increase in LNG import capacity of about 35mn t/y, against 142mn t/y of projects in the GOGEL data, meaning the world's largest LNG importer could abandon nearly 75% of its planned expansion. In India, only 23% of planned import capacity has entered construction.

In the US, companies plan 229 GW of new gas-fired power capacity, 30% of the global pipeline and nearly three times China's, with at least 40% of it directly linked to data centres.

Asset managers, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and insurers hold more than $5.8 trillion in companies developing new oil and gas assets, according to Urgewald research published in June 2026, though a growing number of European investors and banks have begun restricting their support for the sector or refusing to buy new bonds issued by oil producers.