A whistleblower CEO who partnered with Shell on an emission reduction project says the Chinese oilfield his company supplied to was actually a chicken farm, as Germany battles allegations of a potential $5 billion fraud over carbon reduction schemes.
Several biomethane suppliers who have partnered with major oil and gas companies on Upstream Emission Reduction (UER) credit schemes say dozens of overseas projects were faked, putting German regulators, auditors, and companies like Shell in the spotlight.
Zoltan Elek, the CEO of Landwärme, a biomethane supplier to Shell and other large oil and gas firms, flagged the complaint about a supposed chicken farm posing as an oilfield to Shell’s internal whistleblower site in January.
Emission reduction schemes like UER help large oil and gas companies meet their greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction quotas. Carbon credits obtained in the process are traded on the open market to allow businesses to offset their CO2 emissions.
Semafor first reported Elek’s complaint on Wednesday morning.
The chicken farm was just one of several false sites Elek says a Chinese whistleblower uncovered in September.
“The whole documentation always looked very good and perfect,” Elek told Fortune. “But if you took out something like the geo-coordinates, you ended up somewhere, sometimes in a lake, sometimes in a chicken farm.
“It’s like if somebody wants to generate some CO2 certificates with a windmill and just goes out to the countryside and takes a picture...
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