External citations of our work

“It reminds me of the industry back when you’re watching ‘There Will Be Blood’ and they used to let [oil] explode out of the ground and collect it,” said Deborah Gordon, a Brown University senior fellow, who researched California’s Midway-Sunset field, where many surface spills occur. Her group concluded it emitted more greenhouse gases than any oil field in the nation. “This is not where this industry needs to be.”

“A switch to electric vehicles should not make Houstonians who rely on the petrochemical industry nervous. First, nothing is happening overnight, Gordon said. We are not talking about no refining, but remaking refining, [so] new products made with petroleum could help address pollution [because] you don’t only have to burn it.”

“The deal suggests that the fundamentals of BP’s business have yet to change. What I would love to see from BP, Shell, Equinor and Repsol is the playbook,” Gordon said. “I don’t mean individual announcements. I want to see the 21st-century non-Rockefeller supply chain of how this industry transforms itself.”

“Natural gas resources have life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions that are just as wide-ranging as oil. That’s a key finding from the OCI+, a new version of the Oil-Climate Index (OCI), a tool for policymakers and investors. ”

“{California oil producers] are chasing their tails on where to go while maintaining their climate leadership,” Deborah Gordon said. “We do know that as oil fields age, they tend to get more carbon intense.”

“The biggest problem in this industry is you never really know [success] until it’s done. The oil keeps flowing and that’s real. But the words just kin of come out.”

“Oil is an extremely durable market. And sadly, I don’t think what we’re seeing from COVID is oil nations like Saudi Arabia or, frankly, the United States, thinking outside the box when it comes to creating an industry that’s [cleaner and] more flexible.”

“The U.S. government should not step in to provide relief for the industry because the current markets need to re-establish equilibrium. Propping up an uneconomic level of U.S. oil and gas production would have the U.S. government piling on to Saudi Arabia and Russia’s geopolitically motivated actions,” [Gordon] said. “It could invite even greater risk and forestall resetting short-term equilibrium.” ”

“The focus on renewables alone ignores the full breadth of the oil industry, [Gordon] said. Take a scenario where adoption of electric vehicles becomes widespread. That would reduce gasoline demand, but refineries would still churn out diesel, jet fuel, asphalt and petrochemicals. The consumer can’t snap their fingers and get off everything in the whole barrel of oil.”

“If California wants to live up to its reputation as an environmental leader, [Gordon] said, it would need to modernize its oil operations and oversight. ”

“Citing the Carnegie Oil-Climate Index, the coalition said in its letter that the Canadian oil sands are one of the dirtiest, highest carbon sources of oil on the planet.”

“Canadian oil is not the most “sustainably” produced — it is, in fact, incredibly unsustainable .... Carnegie’s massive Global Oil-Climate Index confirmed that Canada’s oil sands produce some of the most carbon-intensive oil on the planet.”

“The question is, Gordon says, “under the constraints of climate change, how can we re-draw the refining road map to manufacture net-zero-emission products while shrinking the refining sector’s carbon footprint?”

“Companies such as Suncor and Repsol with exposure to oil sands and heavy-oil operations continue to report higher carbon intensities. Canada’s Athabasca oil sands have the highest level of upstream GHG emissions, based on the Carnegie Oil-Climate Index.”

“And California oil production is uniquely treacherous. “People tend to think all oils are the same, but they’re not,” says Deborah Gordon, a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and a noted expert in the climate burden of global petroleum production. Oil in the San Joaquin Valley typically has a higher carbon-to-hydrogen ratio than does oil from, for instance, North Dakota’s Bakken Formation.”

“I think that [our knowledge of methane emissions] is early,” said Deborah Gordon, a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute. “It is a really important problem, and we’re just starting to get a handle on what it is and how to fix it.”

“Three years ago, Deborah Gordon, then director of the energy and climate program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ranked different types of oil by their carbon emissions at all stages, from extraction to refining to burning. Gordon calculated the kilograms of CO2 (or equivalent) emitted by a given barrel of different types of crude .... Oil from California’s largest and oldest field, Midway-Sunset, came in just behind, at 725 kilograms of CO2 per barrel.”

“ “Expect a big push through asset owners to park significant amounts in activities that align with a 1.5-degree climate trajectory,” says the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Deborah Gordon. ”

“A recent paper in Science calculated the carbon intensity of oil from thousands of oil fields ... The authors estimated that through wise resource choices and improved gas management practices the oil industry could reduce emissions over the next century by at least 18 Gt and as much as 50 Gt considering other mitigation opportunities such as reduced emissions from oil refining.
...
Deborah Gordon at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and retired Chevron scientist Stephen Ziman wrote a useful article on petroleum industry climate plans. They argue that companies need to develop transparent systems based on standardized verifiable climate plans.”

“The situation owes itself to an oddity of America’s oil market, said Deborah Gordon, director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s climate and energy program. U.S. refineries are set up to process heavy crudes produced in countries like Canada, Mexico and Venezuela — not the light sweet brands pumped from Texas’ Permian Basin or the Bakken in North Dakota. The result: America exports much of the oil it produces and consumes crude it buys from elsewhere. There is a climate cost to that dynamic.”

“Guest Bloggers Deborah Gordon and Frances Reuland: Is California Extraordinary? Its Oil Resources Certainly Are”


“Despite ongoing federal rollbacks to environmental regulations, California has the right to set its own clean air standards because it is truly extraordinary. Truth be told, the compelling circumstances that first set in motion California’s vehicle emissions standards remain entirely valid ...”

“Another way that varieties of oil and gas can differ is in their greenhouse gas emissions. Most of the lifecycle emissions from oil are released when it is burnt, but the differences in production, processing and transport are so great that they can make a significant difference to the total. The IEA (using the OCI) calculates that, in principle, there would be large savings in emissions from shifting to less polluting sources, for example with lower leakage of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Switching from the highest-emitting sources to the lowest would cut total lifecycle emissions 25 per cent for oil and 30 per cent for gas. it says.”

“Shining a light on this question is clouded by several factors: a lack of transparency about oil and gas-related emissions, an absence of coherent measurement methodologies (Oil Climate Index) ...”

“Using data from the Carnegie Endowment and Knut Einar Rosendahl, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, researchers showed that Ghawar and Safaniya, fields run by Saudi Arabia, emit around 50 and 30 kilograms of carbon dioxide per ton...”

“The Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) approach takes advantage of carbon naturally stored by plants during photosynthesis. ‘By burning biomass to generate energy before it decomposes and releases its bounty of carbon and then capturing the carbon released during biomass combustion and storing it underground, BECCS removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,’ says Deborah Gordon.”

“For the last several years, [Gordon’s] team, including Joule A. Bergerson from the University of Calgary and Jonathan Koomey from Stanford University, has been trying to develop an Oil-Climate Index that looks at the life-cycle greenhouse-gas emissions from different oils. What they’ve found is remarkable: Some oils produce many times the total emissions of other oils. But all these substances go by the same name.”

“Gordon ... warns that such a petroleum-free future is a long way off ... and even if the world switched to solar-powered electric cars tomorrow, petroleum would still be used in plastics, drugs, and jet fuel. ‘We could be at this another 100 years,’ she says, ‘and oil resources will only get harder to extract.’ ”

“Opportunities to reduce emissions can be found in understanding that different kinds of oil are responsible for drastically different levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Oil produced in one place may release significantly more GHGs than oil produced in another, according to a new Oil-Climate Index published this month by a team of scientists from Stanford University, the University of Calgary, and the Carnegie Endowment...”

“A first-of-its-kind oil-climate index ... captures the huge spread between the most and least intensive greenhouse gas (GHG) oils. By calculating the carbon costs of various crudes and related petroleum products, the authors suggest that companies and policymakers can better prioritize their development.”

“ ‘I knew a paradigm shift in the oil sector was going to come,’ Gordon recalled. She wanted to know, ‘What do all these diversifying oils mean for the climate, and how do they stack up against each other?’ ”

“Oil is changing and getting dirtier, riskier to extract, and more expensive to produce. This Oil Climate Index is a treasure trove of important information that my colleagues and I at UCS will be digging into in coming months, but right off the bat, I wanted to share 5 key insights and the data that backs them up.”

“Oil firms are facing lots of environmental pressure and scrutiny these days, but to a large degree, oil’s actual carbon footprint varies greatly depending on the type of oil and the extraction method used. In fact, the heaviest-polluting oils impact the climate almost twice as much as the cleanest oils, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found in its new Oil-Climate Index tool designed for policymakers and investors, detailed in the report Know Your Oil.”

“According to [the Know Your Oil] report released by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last month, we are not running out of fossil fuels anytime soon. ...With future technologies, it may well be that the suffering sky is the limit.”