Oil

What’s the cheapest, quickest way to reduce climate change without roiling the economy? In the United States, it may be by reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas industry. Methane is the main component of natural gas, and it can leak anywhere along the supply chain, from the wellhead and processing plant, through pipelines and distribution lines, all the way to the burner of your home’s stove or furnace. Once it reaches the atmosphere, methane’s super heat-trapping properties render it a major agent of warming. Over 20 years, methane causes 85 times more warming than the same amount of carbon dioxide. But methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for long, so stopping methane leaks today can have a fast impact on lowering global temperatures. That’s one reason governments at the 2022 United Nations climate change conference in Egypt focused on methane as an easy win in the climate battle. So far, 150 countries, including the United States...

The world could still, theoretically, meet its goal of keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, a level many scientists consider a dangerous threshold. Realistically, that’s unlikely to happen. Part of the problem was evident at COP27, the United Nations climate conference in Egypt. While nations’ climate negotiators were successfully fighting to “keep 1.5 alive” as the global goal in the official agreement, reached Nov. 20, 2022, some of their countries were negotiating new fossil fuel deals, driven in part by the global energy crisis. Any expansion of fossil fuels – the primary driver of climate change – makes keeping warming under 1.5 C (2.7 Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times much harder. Attempts at the climate talks to get all countries to agree to phase out coal, oil, natural gas and all fossil fuel subsidies failed. And countries have done little to strengthen their commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the...

With the U.S. government promising over US$360 billion in clean energy incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, energy companies are already lining up investments. It’s a huge opportunity, and analysts project that it could help slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about 40% within the decade. But in conversations with energy industry leaders in recent months, we have heard that financial incentives alone aren’t enough to meet the nation’s goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. In the view of some energy sector leaders, reaching net zero emissions will require more pressure from regulators and investors and accepting technologies that aren’t usually thought of as the best solutions to the climate crisis. ‘Net-zero,’ with natural gas In spring 2022, we facilitated a series of conversations at Penn State University around energy and climate with leaders at several major energy companies – including Shell USA, and electric u...

Russia’s effort to conscript 300,000 reservists to counter Ukraine’s military advances in Kharkiv has drawn a lot of attention from military and political analysts. But there’s also a potential energy angle. Energy conflicts between Russia and Europe are escalating and likely could worsen as winter approaches. One might assume that energy workers, who provide fuel and export revenue that Russia desperately needs, are too valuable to the war effort to be conscripted. So far, banking and information technology workers have received an official nod to stay in their jobs. The situation for oil and gas workers is murkier, including swirling bits of Russian media disinformation about whether the sector will or won’t be targeted for mobilization. Either way, I expect Russia’s oil and gas operations to be destabilized by the next phase of the war. The explosions in September 2022 that damaged the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines from Russia to Europe, an...

Fossil fuels are the leading driver of climate change, yet they are still heavily subsidized by governments around the world. Although many countries have explicitly promised to reduce fossil fuel subsidies to combat climate change, this has proven difficult to accomplish. As a result, fossil fuels remain relatively inexpensive, and their use and greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow. I work in environmental and energy law and have studied the fossil fuel sector for years. Here’s how fossil fuel subsidies work and why they’re so stubborn. What is a subsidy? A subsidy is a financial benefit given by a government to an entity or industry. Some subsidies are relatively obvious, such as publicly funded crop insurance or research grants to help pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs. Others are less visible. A tariff on an imported product, for example, can subsidize domestic manufacturers of that product. More controversially, some would argue that when a gov...