ING funding oil firms it vowed to drop, report finds

ING has failed on its promise to stop financing oil and gas companies that keep opening new fields, an investigation by Follow the Money (FTM) has found.

In September 2024 the Amsterdam-based bank said it would immediately halt all new financing to companies whose business is exploring for and extracting oil and gas, so-called “pure-play” producers, as long as they were still opening new fields.

It went on to help fund three of them anyway: Norway’s Aker BP and Vår Energi and the UK’s NEO Energy, all of which are pure-play producers.

The general loans and bonds it arranged for the companies through 2025 and into 2026 came to more than $900 million, FTM found. Larger, diversified firms such as Shell, which also refines, transports and sells oil, are outside the pledge and ING can still finance them.

Environmental organisation Milieudefensie, the Dutch arm of Friends of the Earth, called the pledge misleading from the start. Most oil and gas is pumped by exactly those bigger firms the promise did not cover, said Nicky van Dijk, who leads the group’s research for its climate case against the bank.

“They’ve closed off one small loophole,” she told FTM, “and now it turns out they’re not even sticking to that.”

ING’s annual reports show its direct lending is falling: outstanding loans to upstream oil and gas firms dropped from €2 billion in 2024 to €1.4 billion in 2025, according to FTM. But that misses the bond market, where ING still helps these firms borrow – arranging the sale of their debt to investors instead of lending to them directly.

ING told FTM it does not comment on individual clients, and that its policy follows the International Energy Agency’s net-zero scenario, which it said sets no exact definition of a “new” field. But the agency classes any project begun after 2021 as new, FTM said, and found at least one at each of the three firms.

The findings could feed into Milieudefensie’s case against ING, filed in 2024, which demands the bank halve the emissions it finances by 2030. “One investment could still be a mistake,” Van Dijk said, “but three?”.