Ipieca CEO Brian Sullivan reflects on progress made during Q2 2025

Launch of Ipieca’s 2025-2028 Strategy

2025 marks the implementation of the new Ipieca strategy, developed last year in close consultation with members and stakeholders.

The key strategic issue to rise out of this review process was how to balance decarbonisation of emissions while meeting the world’s energy needs for social and economic development.

So, what do we hope to achieve over the next four years? We aim to drive understanding and delivery of diverse pathways to net-zero, support the resilience and rehabilitation of local communities and ecosystems, and enable the industry to adapt to the changing reporting and disclosure landscape.

Members and stakeholders recognised that Ipieca is uniquely positioned to help tackle this challenge. It provides a platform to bring together companies producing a significant proportion of the world’s oil and gas as well as an increasing amount of alternative energy, together with other sectors also key to the energy transition, such as the hard-to-abate, mining and metal sectors, around interconnected sustainability issues.

We are excited by the mandate the new strategy gives us to convene members with other sectors and stakeholders to support a transition that delivers for people and the planet.

A big part of how we do that will be by integrating climate, nature and people actions across the industry value chain, along with enhanced transparency through sustainability reporting.

We are well-equipped to help our members navigate a changing global landscape through our ability to address these topics in a holistic way.

For more details on the strategy see my recent article and check out our strategy webpage.

Ipieca Week 2025

Ipieca Week is our annual flagship event, where bring together member company representatives with senior leaders from a range of UN, NGO and academic organisations to share perspectives on sustainability issues facing the industry and progress Ipieca’s work programme through working group meetings and interactive sessions. We’ve published the key messages from our external stakeholder panels on accelerating the industry’s contribution to a sustainable world.

Member engagement in Asia Pacific

Asia Pacific was the backdrop for a lot of our engagement this quarter.

Ipieca took part in our member company PETRONAS’s inaugural Energy & Nature Forum in Kuala Lumpur. The two days of conferences, workshops and meetings explored practical ways to embed nature ambitions into corporate strategies, define meaningful roadmaps and collaborate with stakeholders. I took part in a panel on ‘Mainstreaming nature in business decision making for the energy sector’. We also hosted an interactive, case study focused workshop on integrating nature consideration into energy projects.

We then went on to Asia Energy where Ipieca’s new Chief of Staff Dr Salmaan Inayat-Hussain spoke on the ‘Collaborative pathways to energy security and transition in Asia and beyond' panel and I took part in the ‘Decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors’ panel.

We also visited Jakarta and our newest member in the region, Pertamina. We were deeply impressed, not just by the warm welcome but their impressive sustainability approach, which we got deep insights into, taking part in their sustainability conference and workshop.

Supporting the IMO Net Zero Framework

The International Maritime Organization (IMO)’s Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) met for its 83^rd session where it approved the IMO Net Zero Framework, the first in the world to combine mandatory emissions limits and greenhouse gas pricing across an entire sector. In its observer capacity, Ipieca delegates attended IMO MEPC 83, where they engaged in technical discussions on GHG emissions from ships, and provided input on the IMO’s sustainable fuels certification framework, life cycle analysis guidelines and Net-Zero Framework.

Healthy oceans

As always, we remain guided by UN conventions and do our best to contribute to these by providing good practice guidance to support them, contributing technical inputs when requested and raising awareness of them with our membership, the wider industry and stakeholders.

This quarter the UN turned its focus to our oceans, celebrating World Oceans Day and holding the UN Ocean Conference in France.

The ocean is so important to the planet and everything on it. Covering 70% of the earth, it produces a lot of the oxygen we breath, is a home for most of the world’s biodiversity and provides a living for around 40 million people. So, of course the welfare of the ocean is an important issue for Ipieca.

We helped raise awareness of UN World Oceans Day and the UN Ocean Conference as well as the importance of oceans, sharing good practice to support healthy oceans.

In between World Oceans Day and the UN conference we published the Supporting the IMO Net-Zero Framework: decarbonisation of the maritime sector factsheet, raising awareness of the important work the IMO does and the support Ipieca and its members provide through technical inputs and good practice Ipieca.

Ipieca guidance and resources published in Q2

The fact sheet was not the only publications we released in Q2, in fact we published ten new resources to support oil, gas and alternative energy companies advance their environmental and social performance. The high output and quality of deliverables really is a testament to the commitment and hard work of our member company representatives and Ipieca secretariat.

Space limitations mean I can’t provide full details of each one here, but do click on the links to find out more and more importantly start using them in your companies:

• The fifth edition of the Sustainability reporting guidance for the oil and gas industry including a just transition section and indicator
• Finalisation of the Energy efficiency compendium update
• An update to the Recommended practices for methane detection and quantification - upstream to include new technologies
• Worker welfare resources including key tools and guidance on responsible recruitment and proactive worker engagement
• SDG Roadmap progress report
• CCS webinars series insights report
• Heath leading performance indicators
• Ipieca 2024 Annual review
• Ipieca Principles toolkit – supporting companies to put the principles into practice

Ipieca member impact

Throughout the quarter, from our membership meetings at Ipieca Week to our participation in PETRONAS and Pertamina sustainability events and seeing and hearing from other members at Asia Energy, I’ve seen just how seriously our members take the issues we work on at Ipieca.

This quarter we added lots of new member case studies to our website, highlighting the action they are taking across a whole range of sustainability topic. Check them out here.