Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC)

InfluenceMap Score
for Climate Policy Engagement
D
Performance Band
46%
Organisation Score
58%
Relationship Score
Sector:
Energy
Head​quarters:
India

Climate Lobbying Overview: Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) appears to have limited engagement with climate change policy. While the company has expressed broad support for climate change mitigation globally, it continues to promote fossil gas as an essential part of India’s energy mix.

Top-line Messaging on Climate Policy: ONGC appears to have had limited top-line communications on climate change in 2021-22. In its 2019-20 Sustainability Report, published in December 2021, ONGC expressed its support for India’s commitments in its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) to the UN Paris Agreement. However, the company has not explicitly supported GHG emissions reductions in line with IPCC-recommended pathways for net-zero by 2050. For example, former Chairman and Managing Director (MD) Subhash Kumar expressed energy security concerns regarding the urgency needed to tackle climate change in a December 2021 interview with Live Mint.

Engagement with Climate-Related Regulations: ONGC has not transparently disclosed details of its engagement with climate change regulations on its corporate website. Further, the company did not respond to the 2021 CDP Climate Change Information Request. There is some evidence to suggest that ONGC supports GHG emissions reduction targets, as highlighted in the company’s Facebook post in July 2019 that appeared to support India’s target to reduce CO2 emissions by a third by 2030.

Positioning on Energy Transition: ONGC appears broadly unsupportive of the energy transition and promotes fossil gas as an integral part of India’s energy system. In a February 2022 press release, Chair and MD Dr Alka Mittal promoted the role of unabated fossil gas in the energy mix, and supported India’s plan to increase gas by 2030. ONGC also stated India would be dependent on “oil and gas for at least 25 to 30 years” in a February 2022 press release. However, in a social media post from December 2021, Mittal appeared to support India increasing renewable energy capacity and reducing fossil fuels, whilst balancing energy security needs. In its 2018-19 Sustainability Report, published in March 2020, ONGC stated support for the electrification of transport in India, declaring that electric vehicles were the “need of the hour”.

Industry Association Governance: ONGC has not disclosed details of its memberships to, or engagement with, industry associations on its corporate website. ONGC is a member of Instituto Brasileiro de Petróleo e Gás (IBP), and has a representative on IBP’s board of directors. IBP appears to take mixed positions on climate change policy.

InfluenceMap collects and assesses evidence of corporate climate policy engagement on a weekly basis, depending on the availability of information from each specific data source (for more information see our methodology). While this analysis flows through to the company’s scores each week, the summary above is updated periodically. This summary was last updated in Q1 2023.

Additional Note: ONGC is headquartered in India, where InfluenceMap’s LobbyMap platform can currently only make a provisional assessment of corporate climate policy engagement, due to limited capability to access publicly available data on this issue. As it is possible that InfluenceMap is not yet able to fully capture evidence of ONGC's climate policy engagement activities, these scores should be considered provisional at this time.

In addition, ONGC is a listed company with more than 50% of its shares owned by the government of India. State-owned enterprises likely retain channels of direct and private engagement with government officials that InfluenceMap is unable to assess, and therefore are not represented in ONGC's engagement intensity metric.

QUERIES
DATA SOURCES
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-2NA-2NANANANS
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-10NSNSNS-1NS
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-2NA-2NANANANS
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Strength of Relationship
STRONG
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
WEAK
 
62%
 
62%
 
53%
 
53%

How to Read our Relationship Score Map

In this section, we depict graphically the relationships the corporation has with trade associations, federations, advocacy groups and other third parties who may be acting on their behalf to influence climate change policy. Each of the columns above represents one relationship the corporation appears to have with such a third party. In these columns, the top, dark section represents the strength of the relationship the corporation has with the influencer. For example if a corporation's senior executive also held a key role in the trade association, we would deem this to be a strong relationship and it would be on the far left of the chart above, with the weaker ones to the right. Click on these grey shaded upper sections for details of these relationships. The middle section contains a link to the organization score details of the influencer concerned, so you can see the details of its climate change policy influence. Click on the middle sections for for details of the trade associations. The lower section contains the organization score of that influencer, the lower the more negatively it is influencing climate policy.