The French banking group Société Générale has announced plans to stop financing companies, whose current activities in thermal coal represent 50% or more of their business. It will also stop financing companies for which thermal coal represents 30% to 50% of their activities and that plan to expand their thermal capacities or that have no reduction strategy to reach 30% by 2025. In 2015, the group had already announced that it would stop project financing for the development of coal mines and coal-fired power plants in high-income OECD countries. In 2016, it decided that it would no longer finance coal-fired power plants or related infrastructure in the world as of 1 January 2017.
According to the environmental group Friends of the Earth, Société Générale financed more than US$7bn of fossil fuel projects between 2015 and 2017 and funded more than US$1.1bn of LNG projects in North America in 2017.