CEO Message

Enabling a Sustainable Future

We outline the steps taken to align our business strategy with our commitment to creating enduring social, economic, and environmental impacts in the region. In the past six years, since we began our sustainability reporting journey, we have progressed, learned and made constant improvements. This has also helped us build resilience within our business, as well as enabled us to continue growing despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year’s sustainability report, titled “Legacy of Progress”, coincides with Crescent Petroleum’s 50th anniversary. The milestone offers an occasion to reflect on our progress and accomplishments over the past five decades. Additionally, it provides an opportunity to look ahead to reinforce our commitment to build social sustainability and empower the communities where we operate.

In 1971, the idea of sustainability was hardly a discussion among academics, and natural gas was considered a waste product. We sought to unlock the tremendous resources in the region by creating common value and have leveraged our understanding of the Middle East to help build lasting prosperity. Over the years, we have shifted our focus towards clean burning natural gas to supply cleaner electricity generation in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), while reducing our carbon intensity each year.

Natural gas now accounts for close to 80% of Crescent Petroleum’s total production. It facilitates affordable electricity for millions of people, while allowing the region to avoid more than 42 million tonnes of CO2 emissions to date by displacing liquid fuels with natural gas. The carbon savings have amounted to the equivalent of removing 1 million cars off the road for two years and an associated cost savings of more than US$27 billion to the KRI Government to date.

Majid Jafar Crescent petroleum 2023

Crescent Petroleum has also reduced gas flaring by nearly 28%, to just 0.31% of production with plans to further reduce it towards zero. The culmination of these efforts came in 2021 as we reduced our carbon intensity to 6.3 kgCO2e/BOE, which compares favourably to 2018-2019 Regional and Global intensity values of 8.1 kgCO2e/BOE and 17.6 kgCO2e/BOE respectively. We then took the proactive step of offsetting our emissions for both 2021 and for our forecasted emissions for 2022, thus becoming one of the first oil and gas companies in the industry to achieve and announce carbon neutrality across our operations. This milestone highlighted the success of our efforts to be a responsible operator. We also acknowledge that carbon reduction is a key aspect as natural gas progresses to be a critical part of the energy mix by replacing coal and liquid fuels, particularly in the developing world.

As we proudly celebrate Crescent Petroleum’s 50th anniversary and express our gratitude to all those who helped us reach this point, we also continue to reinforce our sustainability efforts to ensure a brighter future. At our core, we believe that enabling our people and communities to tackle some of the Middle East’s major challenges is not just good business, but critical to our long-term success. We strive to fortify that spirit in everything we do, and in turn, instil resilience amongst our teams and operations to make a positive impact on the world around us.