European companies purchased at least 2.6 million carbon credits from Chinese oil and gas projects that Bloomberg investigations revealed to be non-existent or lacking the necessary equipment for emissions capture. In 2023, almost 120,000 credits from China's Changqing oilfield were registered with Austrian and Polish authorities, despite BloombergNEF finding no evidence of the projects' existence during a November 2025 visit. This follows a 2024 ZDF exposure of a similar scandal where 45 Chinese projects sold fake offsets into Europe's UER scheme, leading German authorities to withdraw 2.1 million credits from 30 projects. Despite the fraud, neither the project developers nor the European companies that bought the offsets, including BP and Shell, face legal consequences.
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