The 25 largest oil & gas companies in the world have expansion plans that will gnaw at 90% of the amount of CO2 we have left before we exceed the most ambitious threshold of the Paris Agreement
According to Global Carbon Project, our carbon budget for 1.5 degrees is 380 Gt CO2e
(sustainabilityenvironment.com) – The expansion plans of the 25 largest oil & gas companies in the world are enough to consume almost all the carbon budget that remains on the Planet before exceeding the threshold of +1.5 ºC of global warming. The budget that last November the Global Carbon Project quantified in 380 Gt CO2e (billions of tons of CO2 equivalent).
Who steals our carbon budget for the 1.5 °C
These 25 major hydrocarbons alone maintain more than 3700 extraction sites. And they’re planning to put another 300 oil and gas fields online soon. Which together contain 500 billion barrels of oil and over 65,000 bcm of gas. If they were fully exploited, they would put 340 Gt CO2e into the atmosphere, about 90% of the carbon budget for the 1.5°C.
To do the math is Energy Monitor from data provided by Global Data. Leading the ranking of the major polluters in oil & gas is Saudi Aramco, the Saudi flag carrier. With 60 Gt CO2e from oil and 7.4 Gt CO2e from gas, its total emissions will be 6 times higher than those generated in a year by China. The podium was completed by China National Petroleum with, respectively, 29 and 14.6 Gt, and finally the French TotalEnergies with 27 Gt and 17.9 Gt.
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Hundreds of oil and gas fields have an estimated useful life exceeding 2050. The estimated average final year for operating and future fields is beyond 2050 for companies such as Shell (2050), ExxonMobil (2051), Equinor (2054) and Aramco (2064). Exxon even has a field that it plans to exploit until 2113. It is Spijkenisse-Intra, in Holland.
Most of Aramco’s large deposits have an expiration date of around or after 2070. Deposits closing before the middle of the century contain 3 billion barrels of oil equivalent (buoys), those that will close later enclose 168 billion. And it’s an established trend for almost all majors. Total will extract 16 billion buoys before 2050 and 104 after. China National Petroleum 19 and 93. Exxon 18 pre-2050 and 80 in the second half of the century.
