Royal Bank of Canada: Surging Finance of Fires, Floods & Climate Chaos

This report provides an urgent and up-to-date reckoning of the Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC)’s fossil fuel financing, with a focus on the loans, underwriting and investments it has provided the largest fossil fuel expansionist companies from 2016 to September 30, 2022 (the end of Q3). This report also provides a comparison of fossil financing before and after RBC joined the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), a sub alliance of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero (GFANZ).

This report reveals RBC:

• Provided more than $9.2 billion of financing and underwriting to top fossil fuel expansionists like Enbridge, ExxonMobil, Chevron, TC Energy and Saudi Aramco, since joining Glasgow Finance Alliance for NetZero (GFANZ);
• Loaned $1.944 billion to the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project;
• Currently holds over $16 billion of extreme fossil fuel companies on behalf of its clients, a $1.1 billion investment bump in these companies;
• This includes $6.1 billion in tar sands activity exposure, $5.4 billion in shale, $232 million in LNG, and $1.6 billion coal-exposed companies.
• RBC’s financing of extreme fossil fuels may exceed $10 billion in 2022, at its current rate, surpassing 2021 levels
• This includes $3.4 billion of financing to shale or fracking companies, $2.7 billion to tar sands companies, $1.4 billion to coal power companies and $1.3 billion with LNG companies so far in 2022.