Acting as a separate company, the OMV Future Energy Fund will provide assistance to renewable opportunities within the OMV group, with both financial and project management support totalling more than €100 million.

OMV said these investments would represent more than €500 million in total, as the petroleum company attempts to address the “growing global challenges of an increasing energy demand, the finiteness of fossil fuel stocks and climate change”.

OMV chief executive Wolfgang Ruttenstorfer said the new business would focus on three main areas: improved energy efficiency; emissions reductions; and renewable energy technologies ranging from biofuels and hydrogen research to geothermal energy projects.

“In the coming years, the importance of renewable energy sources will continue to increase,” Ruttenstorfer said.

“With the OMV Future Energy Fund, it is our intention to facilitate the transformation from a pure oil and natural gas group into an energy group whose portfolio includes renewable energies. We are convinced that this will enable us to achieve a profitable integration of renewable energies – including biogas, geothermal energy and hydrogen – in the company’s core businesses.”

OMV has appointed an advisory council to assist the company in identifying renewable energy projects that will be suitable for integration with the OMV energy portfolio. The advisory council includes four scientists and one OMV representative from each of its three main operational divisions, Exploration & Production, Refineries & Marketing and Gas.

The scientific appointments include:

University of Hohenheim’s Professor Marianne Haug, management board chair of the Forum for Energies of the Future;

University of Lund’s Professor Thomas Johansson, director of the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics and policy advisor to the United Nations Development Programme on Energy and Climate Change;

Climate change expert and meteorologist Professor Helga Kromp-Kolb from the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences; and

Technical University of Vienna’s Professor Nebojsa Nakicenovic, head of the Department for Sustainable Strategies at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Nakicenovic was one of the principal authors of the Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“We rely on independent external expert know-how to give investments at OMV a sustainable and future-oriented direction. We are also looking forward to integrating innovation from the outside,” Ruttenstorfer said.