Summary
Steyer-Taylor Center Research Fellow Jonathan Koomey comments in an article discussing the Oil-Climate Index project, of which he is a co-author.
Oil is a well-known foe of the climate: Burning it to power cars or produce electricity creates harmful emissions of greenhouse gases. But each type of crude oil, it turns out, results in a unique carbon footprint, with some causing far more climate damage than others.
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“There’s a business risk associated with carbon emissions,” Jonathan Koomey, a Stanford University research fellow, said at a Wednesday panel hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Washington, D.C., think tank teamed with Stanford and the University of Calgary in Canada to create the Oil-Climate Index project, unveiled at the morning conference.
“Having the kind of information that we’ve generated here … will allow investors and other actors in the industry to take proactive steps and say, ‘Look, the greenhouse gas emissions from our fields are much better than those of our competitors,’” Koomey said. “That’s an example of where you could see differentiation among major players who want to gain an advantage [in a low-carbon future].”
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Similar projects were already in the works. Adam Brandt, an assistant professor at Stanford, had helped develop a tool to calculate the upstream emissions of oils used in California refineries. The state government uses those numbers to help enforce its Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, a three-year-old law that requires fuel refiners and distributors to lower the carbon-intensity of their supplies by 10 percent by 2020.
But the Stanford model doesn’t tease out the differences in emissions between midstream refineries and final consumption; it assumes a fixed number for those categories. So Brandt helped create an all-encompassing version for the Oil-Climate Index, along with Gordon, Koomey and Joule Bergerson, an assistant professor in the University of Calgary’s chemical and petroleum engineering department.
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Koomey said on the panel that he hopes the index will start a conversation among policymakers and industry officials about the future nature of the world’s crude oil. “If you take away only one thing, it’s that the [emissions] variations in oils are large enough to matter.”
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