At current rates, oil and gas companies will prevent world from hitting 1.5°C warming goal
Learn more from GlobalData
Oil and gas industry’s performance against the Paris climate goals today shows that, without immediate and decisive action, the sector would prevent the world from meeting the IPCC’s 1.5°C global warming scenario by 2050.
The benchmark from the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA), alongside partners CDP and ADEME, scores private, state-owned and publicly listed companies using CDP’s and ADEME’s Assessing low Carbon Transmission (ACT) methodology. This is the first time the industry has been judged against a 1.5°C scenario - the most ambitious emissions reduction plan proposed by the Paris Agreement - and the first study to assess oil and gas companies using the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Net Zero Emissions by 2050 scenario.
Assessing 100 of the world’s biggest oil and gas firms against this scenario, it shows that based on current rates of production these companies are set to consume the sector’s allocated carbon budget (from 2019 to 2050) by 2037 - 13 years too early. Despite this trajectory, researchers found that none of the 100 companies have committed to stopping exploration. Other key findings include:
From 2014-2019 the majors and National Oil Companies (NOCs) all increased either their oil or gas production.
Only 13 companies have low carbon transition plans that extend at least 20 years into the future.
The top 10 companies in the ranking all come from Europe.
State owned companies emerge as the ones that hold significant influence, but are severely lacking in corrective action, eating into the IEA’s remaining overall carbon budget (for all sectors). Oil and gas extracted by the 100 companies assessed is set to use up nearly 80% of the remaining CO2 budget for all sectors and all human activities. State-owned companies will take up half the remaining carbon budget (54%). The seven oil majors (BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell and Total Energies) account for a further 13%, and independent companies 12%.
Sector marked by lack of ambition and action
Opaque, unambitious or non-existent targets and strategies from the greatest contributors to climate change show that the oil and gas sector is not accepting its share of responsibility for global emissions. Some companies’ scope 3 emissions are equivalent to the emissions of whole countries, for example ExxonMobil’s scope 3 emissions in 2019 were greater than Canada’s. Also in 2019, Saudi Aramco’s scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions were greater than Germany, France, Italy and Spain’s combined emissions.
There is also an overall lack of comprehensive and comparable climate reporting in the sector. Crucial gaps include emissions data, with most companies sharing only partial data across scope 1 and 2. Only a third of the companies, including Galp, Repsol & Equinor, disclose information on scope 3 emissions.
Research & Development (R&D) is another area where companies are yet to show action, despite many referencing “new technologies” as the future of the industry in their transition plans. While more than half of those assessed have disclosed R&D expenditure, only 17 companies report information on the proportion of investment dedicated to low-carbon technologies in 2019. Worryingly, even fewer (just 12) publish information on low-carbon capital expenditure investment plans to 2024 and these planned investments remain too low to enable a shift to a low-carbon world.
Who should pay for climate mitigation? Colorado looks to the oil industry.
Lawsuits across the state accuse the energy companies of deceptive practices that escalated the climate crisis.
2010’s Fourmile wildfire in Colorado destroyed 169 houses.
Patrick Cullis/Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences
This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
More than a decade after the Fourmile Canyon blaze drove even the firefighters out of Gold Hill, blackened hillsides and scorched trees attest to the Colorado mountain town’s close shave with destruction.
“Because of the wind and the dryness, it took off,” said Chris Finn, who volunteers as the town’s fire chief when he’s not running the local inn. “That day in 2010, I felt that my business and my house might not be here anymore.”
Gold Hill’s few hundred residents fled as the fire moved along the ridge above a town that began life as a mining camp during the 1859 gold rush. The firefighters followed when they could not stop the flames swallowing scores of homes.
By the time it was extinguished, the Fourmile blaze had destroyed 169 houses, the most by any wildfire in Colorado history. But that record was broken less than two years later, and then again within days, as the pace of fires picked up.
Gold Hill was once again surrounded by flames last year, which saw a record number of wildfires in Colorado. Now, Finn is bracing for another season of record-breaking fires.
“I’ve lived up here my whole life. You can see the change in the weather,” said Finn.
The 65-year-old fire chief pauses as he sits in the garden of his modest wooden house.
“I hope that my grandson can be sitting here when he’s my age,” he said.
Gold Hill has received a state grant to thin out the forest around the town in the hope of slowing if not stopping future fires. But that is a fraction of the cost that the surrounding county says it will take to deal with the impact of global heating.
Boulder county estimates it will cost taxpayers $100 million over the next three decades just to adapt transport and drainage systems to the climate crisis, and reduce the risk from wildfires.
The county government says the bill should be paid by those who drove the crisis – the oil companies that spent decades covering up and misrepresenting the warnings from climate scientists. It is suing the U.S.’s largest oil firm, ExxonMobil, and Suncor, a Canadian company with its U.S. headquarters in Colorado, to require that they “use their vast profits to pay their fair share of what it will cost a community to deal with the problem the companies created.”
“Communities in this country and around the world were essentially robbed of their options.”
“It is far more difficult to change it now than it would have been if the companies had been honest about what they knew 30 or 50 years ago,” said Marco Simons, general counsel for Earth Rights International, which is handling the lawsuit for the county. “That is probably the biggest tragedy here. Communities in this country and around the world were essentially robbed of their options.”
BOULDER COUNTY’S LAWSUIT contends that annual temperatures in Colorado will rise between 3.5 and 6.5 Fahrenheit by 2050 and imperil the state’s economy, including farming and the ski industry.
Extremes of weather are already melting the mountain snowpack, causing increased evaporation and a shortfall in the amount of water flowing down the region’s most important river, the Colorado, which supplies drinking water to the state’s largest cities and irrigation all the way to California and Arizona.
Micah Parkin, founder of an environmental coalition, 350 Colorado, moved to Boulder from New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
“We decided to move to higher ground knowing hurricanes are getting more intense, sea levels are rising,” she said.
Flooding spread over 2,000 square miles, killing eight people, destroying more than 1,700 homes and causing more than $3 billion of damage across 14 Colorado counties.
“They were calling it a once in a thousand year event. I don’t believe that. We’ve loaded the dice for more and more of these intense events happening,” she said. “It’s clear that Exxon and these other companies need to be held responsible.”
Exxon and Suncor are alarmed at the prospect of the cases being heard by local jurors with first-hand experience of the impact of global heating in Boulder. The companies are pressing to move the trials out of state courts and into a federal system where laws on deceptive marketing and consumer fraud do not apply.
“Their strategy is to say that these cases need to be in federal court because federal jurisdiction applies. Then they will turn around and argue that federal law provides no remedy,” said Simons. “It is all about a route to dismissing these cases.”
The outlines of the oil industry’s defence have emerged in newspaper columns pushing back against any parallels with big tobacco and claiming it is the end user, ordinary Americans, that causes pollution.
Gale Norton, a former Colorado attorney general who led the state’s litigation against the cigarette companies and later worked as a legal counsel for Shell, has attacked the Boulder lawsuits as a money grab.
“About the only thing that ‘Big Tobacco’ and ‘Big Oil’ have in common … are the deep pockets of the defendants,” she wrote in the Denver Post. Her column highlighted her position as state attorney general, and later as U.S. Department of Interior secretary under President George W Bush, but made no mention of her work for the oil industry.
“What is our own individual liability, since annual greenhouse gas emissions amount to almost 20 tons per person?”
The Denver Post editorial board followed a similar line in denouncing the “false equivalence” between the cigarette companies and big oil, and said consumers bore the greater responsibility for the climate crisis.
“The companies didn’t create the demand for fossil fuels. We did through our lifestyles and consumption, including every single member of the communities who now wish to target corporations for a legal shakedown,” it claimed.
“The companies didn’t create the demand for fossil fuels.”
That criticism stings in climate-conscious Boulder and other high-income communities that are susceptible to charges of hypocrisy in part because areas of Colorado have some of the highest carbon footprints in the country from heating and cooling larger than average homes.
Max Boykoff, a professor in the environmental studies department at the University of Colorado Boulder, acknowledged the problem, alongside the popularity of high fuel consumption vehicles. But he said that should not be used by the oil companies to absolve themselves of responsibility for a crisis they have played a leading part in creating.
“These lawsuits are one of the tools to hold both these companies accountable,” he said.
Finn said there was no doubt that people moving into the mountains have contributed to the damage from wildfires in part by stopping the natural processes of thinning out the forest.
But the Gold Hill fire chief said the climate crisis was “a big part” of the surging heat and number of fires, and that corporate campaigns to deny the warnings from scientists played an important role.
“The science has been there for years. The problem is that you have half the population who don’t want to believe in science because it means they couldn’t make as much money,” he said.
Chris McGreal writes for Guardian US and is a former Guardian correspondent in Washington, Johannesburg and Jerusalem. He is the author of American Overdose, The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts.
Utah’s oil and gas industry is as busy now as
it was during Trump’s ‘energy dominance’
era
(Brian Maffly | Tribune file photo) Pump jacks pull up hydrocarbons in the Three Rivers oil field southwest of Vernal, near Pelican Lake and the Green River, pictured on June 14, 2019. Members of Congress, including Utah Republicans, are seeking a halt to collection of federal royalties for mining and drilling on public lands — except they want the states to keep getting their share.
By Brian Maffly
| Aug. 4, 2021
There were just three rigs drilling in Utah’s oil and gas fields last January when newly installed President Joe Biden halted new leasing on public lands while his administration reviewed the federal oil and gas program.
Today there are 10 rigs sinking new wells in the Uinta Basin, according to energy consultant Baker Hughes. Meanwhile industry has flooded agencies with drilling proposals in Utah, filing more applications in the past six months than during any six-month period under Donald Trump’s industry-friendly reign as president, according to state data.
While state and industry leaders forecast doom for energy development and rural employment from Biden’s moratorium, which they characterized as a “ban” on development, the exact opposite appears to be happening. Utah’s oil and gas sector is waking up from its pandemic-induced slumber despite obstacles put up by the climate-friendly Biden administration.
So what’s going on? The price of oil has shot past $70 a barrel. Energy companies are acting swiftly to increase production while prices remain high, said the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining.
The boom is proof that financial incentives drive energy development in Western public lands states, not executive orders from the White House, according to Landon Newell, a staff attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
“Utah has claimed the sky is going to fall [because of Biden’s lease moratorium], but this has been directly contradicted by facts and reality,” Newell said. “They are drilling like crazy in the basin where the governor’s office has been claiming things would be at a standstill.”
Critics of the Biden administration have repeatedly characterized the moratorium as federal overreach and predicted dire consequences for the rural West. An industry-backed study from the University of Wyoming, for example, said a ban on development on federal land would blow a $15 billion hole in the Utah economy over 20 years.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s office in May said the leasing moratorium would “halt exploration and potential future investment.”
While welcoming the upsurge in drilling, Cox stands by his earlier position, according to Thom Carter, director of the governor’s Office of Energy Development.
“The economic impact of all of this can be far reaching and we are concerned that decisions could be felt nationwide and have a disproportionate effect on rural Utah,” Carter said. “While what you’re reporting in relation to a rebound out of the pandemic is great, there are still some real economic issues around petroleum right now, including the cost at the pump and that’s regressive at times.”
So far this year, Utah drillers have started 144 wells, according to state data. That’s nearly as many at the 154 for all of 2019, the year before the pandemic, and puts the year on track to beat 2018 and 2017, when 204 and 199 wells, respectively, were drilled.
Rikki Hrenko-Browning, president of the Utah Petroleum Association attributed the rebound to a combination of factors, such as lease agreements secured during the prior administration, a large number of applications submitted anticipating that the Biden administration would not support new federal drilling, and a shift to Tribal lands.
“There is a long lead time from leasing to permitting to actual drilling, and it will take time for the full impacts of the federal leasing policy to be felt,” she said in an e-mail. “However, right now, our state is missing out on key revenues from lease sales that should have happened this year and jobs are at risk if the illegal leasing ban continues.”
Industry critics, however, contend Utah’s oil and gas recovery tells a different story. They say it bolsters the cases made in internal memos prepared by Utah state agencies and a new report that argued Biden’s lease moratorium will not slow energy development in the short term.
This is because so much public land in Western states was put under lease for oil and gas development by the Trump administration. The glut of undeveloped federal leases in Utah would support drilling for the next 60 to 90 years at recent levels of activity, according to a report released Wednesday by the Conservation Economics Institute, an Idaho-based think tank.
“We think of these Western states as having their economies completely tied to this industry,” said Anne Hawke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. “But in fact, there’s so much more going on economically in these states in terms of services and information jobs.”
The report was commissioned by SUWA, NRDC and several other conservation nonprofits that strongly support leasing reform. It examines federal leasing in Utah and four other energy-producing Western states: New Mexico, Montana, Colorado and Wyoming.
The groups posted it Wednesday ahead of expected announcement from the White House of proposed reforms to the federal leasing program overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
“When the industry freaked out after the Biden moratorium, this report is bringing some reason,” Hawke said. “This is a long game and it’s not like we’re going to end tomorrow. The jobs are not affected the way they’re saying they are. It highlights all the reasons why stepping back taking a pause are really rational moves. We all know the system’s broken. We have to look at royalties.”
There is also evidence speculation runs rampant in the federal leasing program, especially in Utah where thousands of acres of leases are issued to people with no known ability to actually develop them.
In his first day in office, Biden halted new leasing while the Interior Department conducted a comprehensive review, which it submitted recently to the White House. The moratorium blocked only new leasing; it did not apply to drilling or production from existing leases.
A federal judge has since overturned the leasing moratorium, but the BLM has yet to resume offering new leases in Utah, although some have been issued in other states.
While conservationists hope Biden’s reforms limit federal leasing, especially in ecologically sensitive or scenic places, Utah officials want to see industry retain access to the West’s publicly owned energy resources.
“We are not interested in actions that pit rural and urban Utahns or rural and urban Americans against each other, and that’s what the president spoke about in his inauguration, it is what Gov. Cox believes, wholeheartedly,” Carter said. “We want market-based decisions. We don’t want government-based decisions, so if the market is driving some of [the drilling surge], that’s great.”
Still, at the end of the day, federal land is not central to Utah oil and gas production, even though Utah is a key public-land state. Of the 1,654 wells currently proposed for Utah, according to Carter, 58% are on non-federal land, that is tribal, state or private land.
A review of past drilling and production shows that only a third of this activity in Utah occurred on federal land. Yet plenty of federal land has been leased. Less than half the 3 million acres under lease in Utah are in production, according to BLM statistics.
In other words, unused oil and gas leases encumber 1.7 federal million acres in Utah, some of them within sight of national parks and monuments. There is not much the Biden administration can do to prevent industry from drilling most of those lands.
Adrian Hedden
Carlsbad Current-Argus
New Mexico oil and gas operators could have almost another 20 years of drilling if not another single federal lease was issued, per recent research.
A study from the Conservation Economics Institute, commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that while New Mexico had the least unused federal acreage leased by the industry compared with other states analyzed in the study, it still has decades until oil companies run out of public land to drill upon.
In its research, the institute compared major oil-producing five states in the inter-mountain west region – New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Montana – which hold 86 percent of federal leases in the U.S.
About 426,266 acres of federal land in New Mexico is leased but unused, per the study, compared with 4.9 million acres in Wyoming, 1.8 million in Utah and about a million each in Colorado and Montana
Utah had the most with almost 100 years for low intensity and 60 years for medium intensity extraction operations, the study read.
More: Ozone pollution at Carlsbad Caverns comes from oil and gas. State readies emissions rules
Evan Hierpe with the Conservation Economics Institute said the data indicated a pause on federal leasing, enacted by the administration of President Joe Biden in January as the Department of the Interior reviews its fossil fuel program, would have little impact on oil and gas operations for the states that have the majority of production on federal lands.
The DOI was expected to release an interim report on the review this summer.
When the pause was enacted, both oil and gas industry leaders and New Mexico’s State administration voiced concerns it could result in oil companies shifting to neighboring Texas where 90 percent of operations are on private land not impacted by federal policy.
More: Data ties series of West Texas earthquakes to oil and gas wastewater
In New Mexico, more than half of oil and gas extraction is on public land, while the state depends on the industry for about a third of its budget.
But Hierpe said reforms to the federal leasing program were needed so states like New Mexico were not vulnerable to the volatile nature of the commodity-based fossil fuel industry, and the pollution it brings.
“The federal oil and gas leasing program is woefully inefficient and outdated. This results in heavy subsidies to oil and gas companies,” Hierpe said. “It results in pollution and it results on a very poor return for taxpayers. There is great need for reforming the leasing program.”
More: Permian Basin oil and gas production expected to rebound in 2022 as fuel demand recovers
New Mexico’s Permian Basin region in the southeast corner of the state recently saw a dramatic uptick in operations, Hierpe said, with oil companies in Eddy, Lea and Chaves counties holding more than 100 federal land lease each.
“What we’re seeing is rapid increases in oil production coming from the Permian Basin in the last few years,” he said.
New Mexico was also one of the states most dependent on federal production, the study read, with 50 percent of oil production coming from federal lands in 2019.
More: New Mexico Democrats: Federal oil and gas methane policy must match state's stricter rules
But operators stockpiled leases in anticipation of changing policies ahead of Biden, a Democrat, taking office after pledging during the campaign to enact tougher controls on oil and gas and pollution he said the industry generated.
“While New Mexico has fewer non-producing acres, they have recently stockpiled leases and drilling acres,” Hierpe said. “There are numerous opportunities in southeast New Mexico in particular for develop on private and state lands. It is a concern for New Mexico but we’re seeing it has at least another decade to see any real economic impacts.”
Hierpe argued oil and gas production can push residents from a region or dissuade people from moving in, while conservation efforts like establishing outdoor recreation opportunities can lead to growing populations.
More: Educators in New Mexico call for shift away from 'unstable' oil and gas revenue for schools
“The same areas that are leasing federal lands are struggling to keep residents. Oil and gas dependent counties repel migrants over the long-term,” he said. “What we found was the direct opposite for protections and conservation which appeared to attract migrants.”
And while the pause on federal leases may lead to a decrease in new acreage for oil and gas, Hierpe contended employment in fossil-fuel-dependent communities was more tied to the price per barrel of oil and market trends.
He said oil and gas was small portion, about 2 percent, of employment in the region in 2019, dropping from about 5.5 percent in 1980.
More: Oil and gas leaders wary post-COVID-19 policy decisions could impede growth
"Oil and gas employment while important in certain regions is a very small amount of overall employment in these states that are most affected," Hierpe said.
Plugging about 2.6 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the intermountain west could create about 85,200 jobs for the next decade, the study showed, and eliminate 252,000 metric tons of methane pollution from the air.
More jobs could be created in the sector by communities embracing less-polluting sectors, Hierpe said, like wind and solar energy along with pushing for more inspections and carbon capture at existing oil and gas facilities.
More:Oil and gas rigs steady in Permian Basin, New Mexico keeps 2nd place in crude production
“What we have with oil and gas is the boom and bust cycle. That often leaves rural communities worse off,” he said. “That mostly goes to large companies. The profits are leaked out of the communities.”
Jesse Prentice-Dunn, policy director at the Center for Western Priorities said the data indicated a pause on federal leases was needed for the federal government to reevaluate how it manages public land.
“Communities are increasingly realizing public lands are our best assets,” he said. “The Biden admin is right right now, to take a pause and have a fact-based review of the leasing program.”
Josh Axelrod, senior advocate for the NRDC’s nature program said past administrations put the oil and gas industry’s needs above public health and the environment.
He said this resulted in drastic impacts from climate change like the extinction of species of plants and animals, drought and wildfires.
“The way lease public lands and waters to oil and gas is broken,” Axelrod said. “For too long, fossil fuel development on federal lands has been prioritized over benefits of other uses that could be beneficial to everyone.”
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/E4TQLEMN5FFRNJOFHZDFZR3HHA.jpg)
/s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/pmn/921d4482-7dbc-42e5-8c22-8f19cf1b188d.png)
