The chickens may be coming home to roost for a “company” posing as an oilfield in Germany in order to fraudulently obtain government tax incentives for reducing carbon pollution.
According to the chief executive of Landwarme, a biomethane company, what was made out to be an oilfield qualifying for the government incentives was actually just a Chinese chicken farm. Zoltan Elek reported the alleged chicken farm to the Shell oil company in January through a portal the company set up for whistleblowers.
That’s not the only instance of questionable practices; Germany is dealing with a number of allegations of fraud in the carbon reduction sector that might add up to $5 billion. Elek’s company Landwarme is one of many biomethane companies that have worked with large gas and oil companies on something called the Upstream Emission Reduction program. Programs like this are used by fossil fuel companies to meet their goals of reducing so-called “greenhouse gas emissions” by trading credits with energy companies that allegedly have a lower pollution profile.
It’s the corporate equivalent of private consumers buying a tree-planting to offset the carbon load of activities like flying on a jet.
Many of the companies like Landwarme say numerous alleged carbon trading projects are simply fake, and that they have duped governments, regulatory agencies, and fossil fuel companies.
Elek says the whistleblower who reported the chicken farm also unearthed information about other fraudulent energy sites in September of 2023. The paperwork submitted by the companies looks legitimate at first glance, he said, but the devil is in the details. When he checked the actual location of the alleged oilfield, Elek found that the geo-coordinates showed him a chicken farm. In other instances the purported sites turned out to be lakes or other areas with no apparent energy projects.
Looking deeper, Elek found that several companies that existed on paper did not truly exist. Some had no physical addresses, or showed Hong Kong registrations. These fake projects get fake carbon credits, he said, and it depresses the prices that can be obtained by legitimate companies.
