Our article in Science on carbon intensity of oil production, out today!

All oil is not created equal when it comes to carbon intensity of production. That’s the message from our latest article, just released in Science today.

This work is part of a broader project to assess the full life-cycle emissions impacts of oil production, refining, distribution, and consumption, summarized in

Koomey, Jonathan, Deborah Gordon, Adam Brandt, and Joule Bergeson. 2016. Getting smart about oil in a warming world. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. October 5. [http://carnegieendowment.org/2016/10/04/getting-smart-about-oil-in-warming-world-pub-64784]

Policy makers have traditionally treated oil as a uniform commodity, but our work shows variations in total life-cycle emissions that are big enough to matter. The 2nd version of the Oil Climate index (OCI) showed a range of 80-90% from the lowest emitting oil to the highest emitting ones.

We’re in the process of adding more oil fields, updating the methodology, and incorporating life-cycle emissions for about half of the natural gas fields in the world. That update work is due out soon.

Here’s the full reference for the new Science article:

Masnadi, Mohammad S., Hassan M. El-Houjeiri, Dominik Schunack, Yunpo Li, Jacob G. Englander, Alhassan Badahdah, Jean-Christophe Monfort, James E. Anderson, Timothy J. Wallington, Joule A. Bergerson, Deborah Gordon, Jonathan Koomey, Steven Przesmitzki, Inês L. Azevedo, Xiaotao T. Bi, James E. Duffy, Garvin A. Heath, Gregory A. Keoleian, Christophe McGlade, D. Nathan Meehan, Sonia Yeh, Fengqi You, Michael Wang, and Adam R. Brandt. 2018. “Global carbon intensity of crude oil production.” Science. vol. 361, no. 6405. pp. 851. [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6405/851.abstract]