BP shrugs off anti-tar sands shareholder resolution

Oil giant BP shrugged off a shareholder resolution requiring it to review its Sunrise tar sands project in Alberta at its annual general meeting yesterday – although not without a significant voter swing against its controversial tar sands policy.

Prior to the meeting, the company said that 94 per cent of shareholders voting in advance had rejected the resolution, which was bought by a group of ethical shareholders including the California Public Employees' Retirement System, and Co-operative Investments.

The resolution, filed in January, questioned the financial viability of the project, which involves an carbon and energy-intensive oil extraction process using the bitumen retrieved from tar sands in the Canadian province of Alberta. BP, which also published its Sustainability Review yesterday, has a 50 per cent stake in the Sunrise project, which could produce 200,000 barrels of tar sands oil each day by 2012.

"Financial concerns include questions about whether future oil prices will be high enough to outweigh the high costs of producing tar sands, installing carbon capture and storage and expected carbon emissions costs," said FairPensions, a responsible investment campaign that backed the resolution. "Investors working with FairPensions think that BP and Shell's financial assumptions may be too optimistic," it added.

However, the final outcome after the meeting showed that fewer shareholders had been against the resolution than BP had thought. In total, 622,272,418 voted for the resolution, 9,497,638,714 voted against, and 1,020,301,075 abstained.

"The fact that 15 per cent of the shareholders refused to back the company's position is significant," said Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner Melina Laboucan-Massimo.

"There will be continued pressure on BP for making the decision to get involved in the tar sands, given that it said it was going to be 'beyond petroleum'," she continued, referring to the company's much-criticised branding strategy.

Greenpeace and other environmental groups have organised a concerted protest against BP's tar sands involvement over the past two weeks, culminating in activity taking place in Calgary, Alberta's capital, yesterday. Similar protests occurred in London outside BP's annual general meeting.

Last week, the Duncan First Nation and Horse Lake First Nation Native American communities in Alberta successfully applied to the Supreme Court of Canada to address tar sands activity, claiming that it violates treaties signed with the Canadian government.

Reports that BP had delayed the controversial project in spite of the shareholder vote were erroneous, according to spokespeople at the company's Alberta office.

Activists will now be looking forward to the annual general meeting of Royal Dutch Shell, to be held on May 18. A similar shareholder resolution has been filed for discussion at that event.