Foreword
In a quiet, workmanlike way, this book makes a revolutionary argument. If it becomes widely understood and applied, it could spell the difference between success and dismal failure in keeping climate change from greenhouse gas emissions to less than 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, the official international target for avoiding catastrophic damage from a rapidly changing climate.
Deborah Gordon was trained as a chemical engineer and began her career working in the oil industry—for Chevron. She later worked in state government, academia, think tanks, and advocacy groups. Her transformative recognition that vast amounts of greenhouse emissions are hiding in plain sight—not recognized, not counted, and not addressed—came from this rare variety of experience and of approaches to problem solving packed in one person. She is relentlessly driven by data, a technical expert who is equally experienced in policymaking, and she is constitutionally unable to see any of the key actors in this global challenge as the bad guys. At one time or another in her career they have all been colleagues and friends.
All of this came together over the past half-dozen years, as she realized that what we used to think of as simply oil—such a dependable thing that John D. Rockefeller named his company Standard Oil for a reason—is actually now a heterogeneous mix of very different chemical entities ranging from heavy sludge to viscous liquid to volatile gas. From there it was a natural step to wonder how greatly these very different entities differed in their greenhouse gas emissions. To answer this question, from her base at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a global think tank, Gordon assembled a team of experts at far-flung universities who together built and integrated a suite of models. With this unprecedented tool in hand, they were naturally led to consider how such varied resources differed not only in their inherent carbon content but also in the emissions intensity of their extraction, processing, refining, transportation,
byproducts, and leakages as well as their eventual end use. From this work came the Oil Climate Index, later expanded to include natural gas, and now known as the OCI+.
The OCI+ transforms one’s understanding of the steps that will have to be taken to control climate change. It focuses attention on the many kinds of unconventional oil and gas being produced with new technologies like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. It demands that advocates for slowing climate change devote their attention not just to a chemical fantasy called “oil” and to its eventual end use—say, gasoline in cars—but to every step in the supply chain in between. The OCI+ revealed that emissions intensities vary by a factor of ten from producing and processing different types of oil and gas and that over their full lifecycle including end use, barrels of otherwise equivalent oil and gas can differ by a factor of three or more. Because these differences are now largely ignored, attractive opportunities to control emissions are being “squandered,” as Gordon terms it. Collecting enough accurate data to fully populate and make use of the OCI+ will be a difficult undertaking requiring governmental action, but if accomplished, it promises a huge—transformative—payoff, allowing policies to be targeted to the lowest-cost, highest-impact steps to control emissions.
Having fully described the current state of oil production and the OCI+, this book spells out a second, equally profound, data-based insight: namely that the supply side is just as important for controlling greenhouse gas emissions as are demand-side policies. In the short term—and the thirty years between now and 2050 is the short term—it is more important. Oil and gas account for 54 percent of global primary energy supply. Moreover, petroleum products are embedded throughout the economy from food companies, pharmaceutical firms, big-box retail, airplanes, plastics—indeed, in just about every industry one can name. So in the crucial few decades ahead, we need to “shift our mindset to assume that oil and gas are here to stay, [so that] we can actually minimize their supply-side emissions now instead of imagining that they will go away.” Divestment strategies, which largely shift resources and emissions from one company to another, will not meet the need. Even combined with aggressive demand-side policies, they will not get the world’s emissions to where they need to be. Rather, governments, academics, and civil society advocates for slowing greenhouse emissions must all recognize that in the near term oil and gas will be a major part of global emissions and that the massive industry that produces them has to be a constructive participant in the global effort.
Relentlessly practical and knowing from direct experience the particular strengths of each set of players, in the closing chapters of the book Gordon lays out an extensive menu of partial solutions to climate change. There is no silver
bullet. Instead, what she calls “2 percent solutions,” layered together, can achieve what needs to be done.
Few books offer a genuinely new way of looking at the world. This one offers two: one grounded in the technical knowledge of a chemical engineer, the other, equally important, based on the experience gained from having addressed climate policy from the vantage of producer, policymaker, analyst, and advocate. Its insights deserve the closest attention by all those concerned with addressing the existential challenge of the changing global climate.
Jessica T. Mathews
Distinguished Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Acknowledgments
Understanding the properties of oil and gas—and analyzing how the production, processing, refining, and end uses of these resources affect the environment—has been my life’s passion. My interest in the oil and gas sector began in the early 1980s, when I worked in a hydrogen catalysis lab during my undergraduate years at the University of Colorado and subsequently as a gas field summer roustabout with Conoco and then as a chemical engineer with Chevron. Later, my graduate work at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and my professional experiences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Yale School of the Environment afforded me the opportunity to study and develop climate-related transportation policies. But it was not until I joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that I was able to connect my knowledge about oil and gas properties to the study of climate change. This book grew directly out of my energy and climate research while working at Carnegie between 2010 and 2019. This research has followed me to RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute), where I currently lead the Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative in the Climate Intelligence Program. I wish to express my appreciation to Jules Kortenhorst and my RMI colleagues for their superb collaboration. I also would like to thank Edward Steinfeld and my colleagues at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, where I am a Senior Fellow and have the opportunity to help mentor the next generation of students.
Many people made important contributions to this project. First and foremost, I would like to thank my Oil Climate Index Plus Gas (OCI+) research partners, Adam Brandt, Joule Bergerson, and Jonathan Koomey, as well as their amazing cadre of past and present graduate students, including Mohammad Masnadi, Hassan El-Houjeiri, Jeff Rutherford, Jacob Englander, Yuchi Sun, Zhan Zhang, Kavan Motazedi, and Liang Jing. This book would not have been completed without their stellar research, keen insights, and enduring friendship.
Acknowledgments
The launch of the OCI+ benefited greatly from the support of Carnegie’s former presidents, Jessica Mathews and William J. Burns. Numerous former Carnegie Junior Fellows and Energy and Climate Program staff were instrumental in this project, including Frances Reuland, Sam Wojcicki, Smriti Kumble, Jeffrey Feldman, Eugene Tan, David Livingston, Wang Tao, Matt Ferchen, Florencia Franzini, Shin-pei Tsay, Rachel Flaherman, Madeleine Bronstein, Anisha Mehta, Hannah Donart, Kate Garner, Yevgen Sautin, Sabine Jonhson-Reiser, Adnan Vatensever, Yuhan Zhang, Tom Carothers, and the late David Burwell. While they are too numerous to name, I am indebted to my many other former Carnegie colleagues and board members for their support and encouragement. Chapter 3 draws directly from the Know Your Oil report that was published by Carnegie in 2015. The OCI+ web tool exceeded expectations and was built (and is being expanded) by Drew Bollinger, Ian Schuler, and their crew at Development Seed.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Ryan DeVries for his meticulous review of the manuscript and his masterful editing skills. Thank you to Devyn Collado-Nicol, Stephen Ziman, Julia Benz, Hilary Levy Friedman, Janet Peargin, Caroline Blanck, and Abigail Lambert for reading drafts and providing feedback and encouragement. Fran Reuland created two superb websites, one for the Oil Climate Project and another for this book. Dina Cappiello, Christian Roselund, Nick Steel, and Jennifer Stokes provided communications, marketing, and development support. For hosting events, participating on panels, convening and attending meetings, and having conversations that sharpened my thinking, thank you to Madhav Acharya, Rachel Adams-Heard, Nate Aden, Ann Alexander, Robert Armstrong, Paul Balaran, Jonathan Banks, Alex Barba, Morgan Bazilian, Johan Bergenas, Heidi Binko, Angela Blanchard, Peter Blanck, Bill Bradley, Sian Bradley, Daniel Bresette, Bruce Cain, Edil Sepulveda Carlo, Tom Carver, Marion Chertow, Jeff Colgan, Lisa Couch, the late John Courtis, Jon Creyts, Cynthia Cummis, Daniel Cusworth, Aaron Davitt, Phil DeCola, Simon Dietz, Kathryn Dunkelman, Riley Duren, Jane Durkin, Chris Elvidge, Stephanie Epner, Dan Esty, Harvey Fineberg, Chaz Freeman, Dan Gardiner, Andrew Glickman, former V.P. Al Gore, Tim Gould, Jeremy Grantham, William Hafker, Leslie Harroun, Hal Harvey, Ned Harvey, Karl Hausker, Sean Hecht, Wolfgang Heidug, John Holdren, Taku Ide, Benjamin Israel, Lucinda Jackson, Daniel Jacob, Sarah Jordaan, Maciej Kolaczkowski, Kevin Knobloch, Jules Kortenhorst, Glada Lahn, Judy Lai-Norling, Sarah Landislaw, Rick Lattanzio, Andrew Leach, Henry Lee, Syed Munir Khasru, Reid Lifset, TJ Loudermilk, Amy Luers, Loreana Marciante, Jeremy Martin, Kevin Massy, Gavin McCormick, Christophe McGlade, Nathan Meehan, Patty Monahan, Kathy Mulvey, Robert Murphy, Moises Naim, Mary Nichols, Susann Nordrum, Cathy Paglia, Margarita Parra, Edward Parson, Arvind Ravikumar, Rafael Reif, Timmons Roberts, Philippe Roos, Joseph Ryan,
Acknowledgments
Wendy Schiller, Jigar Shah, Drew Shindell, Laura Singer, Sarah Smith, Irena Spazzapan, Dan Sperling, Lekha Sridhar, Andrew Stevenson, Benjamin Storrow, Georges Tijbosch, Dan Tuden, Kelly Vaughn, Gabriela Volpato, Carol Werner, Becky White, Catherine Witherspoon, Heidi Yamaguchi, Durwood Zaelke, and so many others that I do not have the space to name.
I wish to thank the following philanthropic institutions for providing generous financial support to create and expand the OCI+ model and write this book: Grantham Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Oak Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, ClimateWorks Foundation, Energy Foundation, Pisces Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund, and Blue Moon Fund. High Tide Foundation, Lyda Hill Philanthropies, and many others continued to support this work when I joined RMI.
To my lifelong friends Barbara Bernstein, Karen Bloomfield, Ayelet Harnof, Beth Johnke, Wendy Kislik-Blanck, Michele Kupfer, Lisa Lawrence, Jill Rutter, Cheryl Wetmore-Simpson, and Shari Weinberger, thank you for patiently listening to me muse about oil and climate change over the years. I also wish to acknowledge my professional mentors, including Eugene Bardach, the late Hank Dittmar, John Falconer, Emil Frankel, Kurt Gottfried, the late Henry Kendall, Jessica Mathews, the late Arthur Rosenfeld, and Kenneth Train. I am extremely grateful that David McBride, Oxford University Press editor in chief, believed in this book project from the start. Thank you to Holly Mitchell, Helen Nicholson, and others at the press who ushered this project to fruition and to the anonymous reviewers for the press whose suggestions greatly improved the manuscript.
Finally, I wish to thank my husband, Eric; my sons, Michael and Josh; my parents, Coco and the late Mike Gordon; my siblings, Jan and Rob; and my extended family members Derek, Anne, Bernie, Dave, and Dayna for their love and support. You are my rocks.
Deborah Gordon Providence, RI August, 2021
Abbreviations
Measurements
bcm billion cubic meters (of gas)
bpd barrels per day (of oil)
Btu British thermal units (of energy)
Gbbl gigabarrel (billion barrels of oil)
Gt gigatonne (billion tonnes)
kg kilograms
m3 cubic meters
MBOE million barrels of oil equivalent
mbpd million barrels per day (of oil)
Mcf thousand cubic feet (of gas)
mcm million cubic meters (of gas)
MMBtu million British thermal units (of energy)
MMcf million cubic feet (of gas)
MMt million tonnes
Mt metric tonnes (which equals 1.1 tons)
ppb parts per billion
ppm parts per million
Scope 1 emissions GHGs emitted directly during industry operations
Scope 2 emissions GHGs emitted indirectly during industry operations, such as electricity supplied
Scope 3 emissions GHGs emitted from the end uses of all petroleum products sold
quadrillion 1015
quintillion 1018
Abbreviations
ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council
APEC Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
API gravity American Petroleum Institute gravity
AR assessment report (produced by the IPCC)
ARCO Atlantic Richfield Company
ARPA- C Advanced Research Projects Agency - Climate
ARPA-E Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy
BOE barrel of oil equivalent
BP formerly known as the British Petroleum Company
Carbon Mapper an public-private-nonprofit consortium locating methane and CO2 emissions from air and space
CAFE corporate average fuel economy
CCAC Climate and Clean Air Coalition
CCL Citizens Climate Lobby
CCS carbon capture and storage (or CCUS is when captured carbon is utilized and not stored)
CDR carbon dioxide removal
CEO chief executive officer
Climate TRACE a emissions tracking project involving several NGOs, including RMI, and the use of artificial intelligence
CMS Carbon Monitoring System
CNPC China National Petroleum Corporation
CO2 carbon dioxide
CO2e carbon dioxide equivalent
COP Conference of the Parties
CTL(s) coal-to-liquids
DRIVE+ a feebates program started in the state of California
EDF Environmental Defense Fund
EIA (US) Energy Information Administration
EITI Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
EOR enhanced oil recovery
EPA Environmental Protection Agency
ESG environmental, social, and governance (factors for evaluating corporate performance)
EU European Union
EV(s) electric vehicles
FPSO floating production storage and offloading
GHG(s) greenhouse gas(es)
GTL(s) gas-to-liquids
GWP(s) global warming potential(s)
GWP* proposed replacement for GWP
Abbreviations
IEA International Energy Agency
INOCs international national oil companies
IOCs international oil companies
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
IPO initial public offering
LCA lifecycle assessment
LCFS low-carbon fuel standard
LiDAR light detection and ranging
LNG liquefied natural gas
LPG liquefied petroleum gas
MiQ a standard to reduce methane emissions in the oil and gas sector through certified differentiated gas
MMS US Minerals Management Service
MRV monitoring, reporting, and verifying (GHG emissions)
NAS National Academy of Sciences
NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NDCs nationally determined contributions
NET(s) net-zero emissions technologies
NGL(s) natural gas liquids
NGO(s) nongovernmental organization(s)
NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
NOC(s) national oil companies
OCI+ Oil Climate Index + Gas
OGCI Oil and Gas Climate Initiative
OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
OPEM Oil Products Emissions Module
OPGEE Oil Production Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimator
PM particulate matter
POFP photochemical ozone-forming potential
PRELIM Petroleum Refinery Lifecycle Inventory Model
R&D research and development
RDD&D research, development, demonstration, and deployment
Saudi Aramco Saudi Arabia Oil Company
SCO synthetic crude oil
SDGs Sustainable Development Goals
SEC US Securities and Exchange Commissions
SINOPEC China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation
SIQ SystemIQ
SLCPs short-lived climate pollutants
SMR steam methane reforming
SOE(s) state-owned enterprises
Abbreviations
TAN total acid number
TCFD Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures
TCI the name of a UK-based hedge fund
TPI Transition Pathway Initiative
TROPOMI Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument
UAE United Arab Emirates
UK United Kingdom
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
USGS US Geological Survey
VIIRS Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer
VOCs volatile organic compounds
ZEV zero-emission vehicle (mandate)
Introduction
The Unexpected Pitfalls of Contending
with Oil and Gas
It’s the spring of 1984. I am a chemical engineer for Chevron, testifying at a public hearing in Santa Barbara, California, in front of the county’s powerful Air Pollution Control Board. Chevron is seeking to develop one of the largestever western US oil leases off California’s central coast.1 Back-to-back oil crises during the mid- to late 1970s—and unpleasant memories of long lines at gasoline pumps—are fueling exploration.2 The national search for oil is on.
Without an air permit, Chevron’s massive project cannot proceed. But the air district’s control officer, John English, has serious reservations about how Chevron’s operations will increase local smog levels. My job is to state how the company can effectively reduce its emissions.
But more oil development is decidedly not what Santa Barbara County’s elected officials want or need.3 A dozen platforms already dot the Southern California coast. Oily blobs of tar naturally seep from the ocean floor, washing ashore and semi-permanently tattooing the feet of those who casually stroll in the sand. Fifteen years earlier, a well blow-out caused the largest oil spill in California’s history, coating Santa Barbara’s coast and killing thousands of birds and marine wildlife.4 Public outrage extended beyond the state’s borders, propelling America’s modern environmental movement and the regulatory frameworks that followed.5
Regardless, the Reagan administration is now expediting offshore oil leasing, citing vast energy supplies and promises of US energy security.6 Although the president’s vacation home is located only a few miles away, other famous Santa Barbara residents adamantly oppose the development of this new oil field.7 Rock stars Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt perform free concerts to raise money for
a local public interest environmental group, Get Oil Out!8 But even the rich and the famous cannot stem the flow of oil, and the coveted air permit for Chevron’s Point Arguello– Gaviota project is granted.
To win approval, Chevron makes a commitment to install and demonstrate (before it is required by law) a novel environmental technology to reduce smogforming air pollutants from the project’s large bank of engines.9 This, along with a promise to abide by roughly 160 other environmental permit conditions, secured a regulatory green light.10 By 1987, construction is complete: three platforms, an onshore oil and gas processing plant and flare, massive storage tanks, expanding marine terminal, and over thirty miles11 of specially insulated pipelines.
More Questions Than Answers
I left Chevron in 1987 and headed to grad school at the University of California, Berkeley. Five years as an engineer in the oil industry had piqued my interest in public policy. I wanted to step back from the conflicts over the merits of a single energy project’s development plans and ask deeper questions. If oil is abundant, why are we proceeding as if it is scarce? Are the differences between hydrocarbon resources greater than their similarities? Why are we overlooking the wideranging climate impacts of oil and gas resources? How can we get stakeholders to work together? Is there a better course for energy and environmental decisionmaking in the United States and the world?
While I was no longer around to observe events in Santa Barbara firsthand, the saga continued. Drilling at Point Arguello began in 1989. Then, just as production peaked in 1993, oil prices tumbled.12 Five years later, oil prices hit rock bottom at $17 per barrel in real terms—their lowest level since World War II.13 Chevron decided to shutter the Gaviota plant and reinject its gas to produce more oil, which was heavy like tar and contained poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas and heavy metals. Within a year, the majority stake in Point Arguello was sold to little-known Plains Resources and then, in 2013, was acquired by the copper conglomerate Freeport-McMoRan.14
In 2015, an interconnected pipeline installed in 1987 ruptured due to severe corrosion, spilling an estimated 100,000 barrels of viscous oil,15 again marring Santa Barbara’s beaches and killing scores of marine wildlife.16 The Point Arguello– Gaviota pipeline was ordered to be completely emptied of all its oil and gas contents after surveys revealed corrosion characteristics similar to those that caused the spill.17 A moratorium was placed on offshore oil production. The pipeline operator, Plains All American, was found guilty in 2019 and ordered to pay over $3 million in fines and penalties. Freeport-McMoRan announced plans to start decommissioning Point Arguello’s three platforms in 2020.18
In retrospect, the project I testified about in 1984, asserting that Chevron was capable of managing all risks, ultimately failed on every dimension. This failure did not result from a lack of trying. It was due to a lack of full understanding. Chevron could not manage what they did not know. Everyone’s perception of reality was distorted by the conventional thinking of the mid-1970s to early-1980s. Oil was thought to be running out, and this elevated the project’s status as a national priority and masked its many challenges. Chevron’s engineers assumed they could easily convert Point Arguello’s unconventional oil into gasoline. Regulators focused on reducing local smog, yet climate pollutants were entirely ignored. And a pitched battle between government, industry, and civil society was assumed to be the only certain way forward. All these assumptions turned out to be wrong or misguided.
Shouldering Climate Risks
The oil and gas industry has confronted many challenges over its century-plus history. It has weathered economic risks (an inevitability of making investments based on very long-term and uncertain price forecasts), political risks (such as losing control of oil reserves due to domestically driven resource nationalization), and operational risks (like delving deeper and faster into more extreme recesses of the earth in pursuit of hydrocarbons), as well as environmental risks (such as mitigating the local impacts of water and air pollution). Another hidden danger, reputational risk—how companies are viewed in relation to their competitors— is also always lurking and can oust corporate heads and threaten the survival of a company.
But the risks posed by climate change are different.19 Climate change cuts across all of these risks: economic, political, operational, environmental, and reputational. It is an existential threat to oil companies’ profit-making model and strikes at the heart of the petroleum industry’s very being. With damages that escalate dramatically over time, the intergenerational costs of global warming are at odds with the long-term returns needed to pay for major capital investments up front.20
At the same time that John D. Rockefeller was growing his Standard Oil empire, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius theorized that the build-up of heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere would increase Earth’s temperature.21 By the early 1900s, fossil fuel combustion was labeled as a main culprit in global warming.22 Carbon dioxide (CO2) measurements have been taken at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since they were first recorded in 1958 at 313 parts per million (ppm).23 As of June 2021, atmospheric CO2 concentrations had risen to 419 ppm.24 And other petroleum-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, such as methane, are
also breaking records at 1,889 parts per billion in March 2021, up 16 percent since July 1983.25
Oil Reality Check
The myths and half-truths about oil and gas and their climate implications muddle both public and private decision-making. Exposing them can realign markets, steer policymaking, guide civil society, and facilitate a durable, low-carbon energy transition. Conversely, glossing over facts or avoiding the truth can set in motion wasteful efforts that impose lasting damages to the local community, global environment, and industry reputations. Using outdated assumptions and methods that ignore external social and environmental impacts (negative externalities) forces citizens to bear the costs rather than companies themselves. These realities, exposed through the lens of my Point Arguello experience, are explored in great depth in this book. They are more pressing today than when I experienced them decades ago.
Reality #1: Oil and Gas Resources Are Physically Abundant
Point Arguello did not stop producing for lack of oil.26 This supergiant field was mired in local politics and unfavorable economics. Since then, however, technological innovations and oil production breakthroughs like hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, and enhanced recovery methods have been unearthing unconventional oil and gas supplies with novel properties (compared to conventional resources), which require new methods to be extracted and processed into the standard petroleum products we consume like gasoline for our cars, propane for our grills, asphalt for our roads, sulfur in our medicine, and petrochemicals in our clothes.27 Massive amounts of conventional and unconventional oil and gas may ultimately be recoverable: trillions of barrels of oil and quadrillions of cubic feet of gas.28 The full bounty of oil and gas exceeds totals we can safely combust. Since oil and gas will not run out, we need to wrestle anew with the climate impacts of abundant fossil fuels.29
Reality #2: Oil and Gas Resources Are Chemically Diverse
Oil and gas may appear to be deceptively simple, consisting of mostly two basic elements—hydrogen and carbon. But their recipes are not. Conventional oil and gas are pooled beneath the surface, freely flow when tapped, and have the consistency of maple syrup (oil) and air (gas). Unconventional resources,
however, are trapped, do not readily flow, and have consistencies ranging from chunky peanut butter to nail polish remover.30 They also can have unusual compositions. Unconventional oils may be heavier (more solidified and containing excess carbon) or extremely light (more gaseous and containing excess hydrogen). Unconventional gases can contain excess carbon (making them quasi-liquid or high in CO2) and other unusual contaminants.
Point Arguello’s oil was unconventional. It was produced from a shale formation (Monterey shale) and was viscous like oil sands, and its gas contained deadly contaminants, like hydrogen sulfide. Its extraction required hot water and chemical additives.31 Nearby refineries required costly retrofits to process its oil. Safety precautions were enacted to decontaminate its gas, and pipelines had to be insulated to make it flow.32 Treating heterogeneous oil (or gas) resources as if they are homogeneous introduces significant economic, safety, and environmental risks.
Reality #3: Oil and Gas Have Wide-Ranging Lifecycle Climate Impacts
Regulatory authorities threw just about every rule in the book at Chevron’s Point Arguello– Gaviota project, except climate change.33 Broad awareness of this global disaster in the making was emerging with the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. Yet, during years of permitting, the inert gas (CO2) was never mentioned, while the powerful climate-warming gas, methane, was expressly disregarded because it was not considered a reactive organic compound that caused smog.34 Other climate-forcing gases were ignored, including the black carbon emitted from burning the project’s heavy-oil byproducts. All in all, producing, processing, and shipping a barrel of Point Arguello crude likely has over twice the climate impact as the oil California now imports from Saudi Arabia does.35 Failing to account for these material differences in lifecycle emissions between the production, refining, and end uses of various oil and gas resources has us flying blind in the battle to combat climate change.
Reality #4: Companies Come and Go, but Oil and Gas Endure
While Chevon spearheaded this multi-billion-dollar project, some two dozen industry partners large and small were involved, and only a few of these companies exist today.36 Even Big Oil—the consortium of Western multinational oil companies—remains in flux. The seven major international oil companies known as the Seven Sisters once controlled over 80 percent of the world’s petroleum reserves.37 Today, their fortunes have reversed. National oil companies
