Warburg Pincus

Warburg Pincus has more than $83 billion in AUM as of August 2024. As of the end of July, 2024, Warburg Pincus owned 13 fossil fuel companies, comprising 93 percent of its total energy portfolio.

Warburg Pincus only discloses about 9,000 metric tons of CO2e of firm level emissions, excluding the emissions from its fossil fuel portfolio. The 2024 Private Equity Climate Risks Scorecard estimates Warburg Pincus’ financed emissions to be over 25 million metric tons of CO2e annually. The lack of robust disclosures and the firm’s commitment to continued fossil fuel investment earned the company a C on the 2024 Scorecard.

In March 2021, Warburg Pincus announced that it will not seek fossil fuel investments in its next buyout fund. Yet in October of 2021, Warburg Pincus-owned Citizen Energy acquired a portfolio of oil and gas production assets located in Oklahoma through a $153 million leveraged buyout. In June 2022, Citizen Energy acquired more upstream acreage in Oklahoma.

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In the second quarter of 2022, Warburg Pincus acquired ClimeCo, a decarbonization advisory firm specializing in carbon offsets, and made an equity commitment in Viridi Energy, a “renewable natural gas” (RNG) company. RNG technologies are often claimed to be sustainable but do not reduce emissions in a meaningful way, in some cases potentially increasing emissions. The offsets (or carbon credits) market is largely unregulated, and there is mounting evidence showing that these offsets fail to deliver its promised GHG emissions reductions. RNG is a costly fuel source with a large carbon footprint that relies on pipelines and trucking, with a high risk of methane leakage.