Oil group Equinor must explain climate discrepancy, minority owners say

OSLO (Reuters) -The board of Norway's Equinor must explain how the company's plan to raise oil and gas production aligns with its stated commitment to the Paris agreement on curbing climate change, a group of minority shareholders said on Tuesday.

Equinor, which is 67% government owned, this year joined the likes of Shell and BP in promising higher petroleum output while scaling back investment in renewables.

In a resolution to be voted on at Equinor's May 14 annual general meeting, the minority owners said there were "material inconsistencies" between the company's climate strategy and the policy expectations expressed by its majority shareholder.

Those expectations, laid out by Noway's government two years ago, included Equinor setting targets and implementing measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions "in both the short and long term" in line with the 2015 Paris climate accord.

"Other shareholders have reasonable expectations that the company would move towards alignment with the expectations of the majority shareholder. Instead, Equinor has gone in the opposite direction," Brynn O'Brien, head of the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR), which co-filed the motion, said in a statement.

Equinor's board of directors, however, asked the shareholders to reject the motion, which was also filed by Danish pension fund Sampension and Swedish pension fund Folksam.

The board said in a statement it considered the company's strategy and its business model to be in line with global climate goals.

"Scenarios of future energy needs, including those aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, indicate that oil and gas will be required for decades to come," it added.

Equinor is Europe's largest supplier of pipeline gas.

The outcome of the vote will depend on the position of the Norwegian government, which generally backs the board's position at AGMs.

The industry ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis, editing by Terje Solsvik)