Burning the world’s remaining fossil fuel reserves would unleash 3.5 trillion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – 7 times the remaining carbon budget to cap global heating at 1.5 degrees Celsius – according to the first public inventory of hydrocarbons released Monday.
Human activity since the Industrial Revolution, largely powered by coal, oil, and gas, has led to just under 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming and brought with it ever fiercer droughts, floods, and storms supercharged by rising seas.
The United Nations (UN) estimates that Earth’s remaining carbon budget – how much more pollution we can add to the atmosphere before the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature goal of the Paris Agreement is missed – to be around 360 billion tonnes of CO2equivalent to 9 years at current emissions levels.
The UN’s annual Production Gap assessment last year found that governments plan to burn more than twice the fossil fuels by 2030 that would be consistent with a 1.5-degree Celsius world.
But until now there has been no comprehensive global inventory of countries’ remaining reserves.
The Global Registry of Fossil FuelsThis project aims to increase clarity about oil, gas and coal reserves in order to fill knowledge gaps and help policymakers better manage phaseouts.
Containing more than 50,000 fields across 89 countries, it found that some countries on their own held reserves containing enough carbon to blow through the entire world’s carbon budget.
For example, US coal reserves embed 520 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent. It found that Australia, Russia, and China all have enough reserves to keep the temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The carbon budget for 1.5 degrees Celsius is seven times greater than what remains of fossil fuel reserves.
”We have very little time to address the remaining carbon budget,” said Rebecca Byrnes, deputy Director of Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation TreatyThank you, who contributed to the compilation of the registry.
”As long as we’re not measuring what is being produced, it’s incredibly hard to measure or regulate that production,” she told AFP.
Transparency, accountability
The registry contains emissions data for each oil, gas, and coal project.
The Ghawar oil field, located in Saudi Arabia, is the largest source of carbon emissions out of the 50,000 included. It produces 525 million tonnes annually.
According to the database, the top 12 polluting locations were found in Russia or the Gulf.
Byrnes claimed that inventories could be used to exert investor pressure in countries with high hydrocarbon reserves. However, there was little chance of widespread pressure to switch away from fossil fuels.
“This just demonstrates that it is a global challenge and many countries that are major producers but aren’t as democratic as the US for example – that’s where transparency comes in,” she told AFP.
We don’t think the registry will result in a huge governance system for fossil fuels. However, it provides investors and other actors with information that will help them hold their governments accountable.
This inventory also revealed large variations in carbon prices between countries. In Iraq, taxes on emissions generated nearly $100 per ton while in Britain they were only $5 per ton.
Simon Kofe (Tuvalu’s foreign minister) stated that the database could help “effectively end coal, oil and gas production”.
“It will allow governments, companies, investors to make decisions about aligning their fossil fuel production with 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature limits and, therefore, concretely prevent demise of our island home, as well as all other countries in our global community.”
