Who is financing TotalEnergies?

Only a few banks, such as Banque Postale or Danske Bank, have chosen to completely exclude financing to companies – such as TotalEnergies – which are pursuing an oil and gas expansion strategy that goes against the recommendations of scientists and the International Energy Agency.  

Only a few of the banks which have financed TotalEnergies over the past 3 years have adopted measures to reduce their financing to the fossil fuel industry. And even these measures are generally inadequate. While they may exclude direct financing for oil and gas projects, they continue to allow financing for oil and gas companies. Furthermore, they only exclude some parts of the fossil fuel production chain, meaning they can still finance midstream infrastructure such as gas liquefaction terminals. Banks also include exceptions intended to make their policies flexible.  

For many years, investors – such as the French Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, Danish APF, British Federated Hermes and Dutch Robeco – have claimed to convince TotalEnergies to adopt a transition strategy aligned with the Paris Agreement. As the company regularly raises its oil and gas production targets, reduces its investments in sustainable energies and has since 2025 refused to have its shareholders vote on its climate plan, it is clear that this dialogue strategy has failed.

Several investors have therefore chosen to exclude TotalEnergies from their investments because of its impacts on climate or human rights. This is the case of the Dutch MN, which, after coordinating the Climate Action 100+ investor dialogue with TotalEnergies for several years, excluded TotalEnergies from its investment portfolio in 2024 and denounced ” years of intensive, yet unsuccessful, climate engagement”. Danish PKA sold its investment in TotalEnergies because of the EACOP project in Uganda, explaining: “we had been in dialogue for a number of years, without them being responsive to the criticism we had made.”

Since the Paris Agreement, investors such as the sovereign wealth fund Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, Ircantec in France and ABP (the largest Dutch pension fund) have announced that they are excluding all companies that develop oil and gas projects from their investments. However, this strategy does not allow them to sanction these companies at their Annual General Meetings.

Investors such as French CNP Assurances have adopted policies that exclude any new investment in companies that, like TotalEnergies, develop new oil and gas fields, while keeping them in their portfolios. This allows them to keep their shareholder power to sanction the leadership of these companies at their annual general meetings, by voting against the re-election of the members of its board of directors, the remuneration of executives or the approval of the financial statements.

Ambition of the oil and gas investor strategy: