Know Your Oil and Gas

Generating Climate Intelligence to Cut Petroleum Industry Emissions

By Deborah Gordon, Jonathan Koomey, Adam Brandt, Joule Bergerson

The oil and gas industry’s emissions reporting lacks sufficient transparency today, especially when it comes to methane emissions. Oil and gas operations have divergent climate intensities that range by a factor of 10. This report offers market actors, policymakers, and the public new climate intelligence to align oil and gas sector greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with 1.5°C climate goals.

The Know Your Oil and Gas report — along with the accompanying Oil Climate Index plus Gas (OCI+) web tool — analyzes the life-cycle GHG emissions for one-half of the world’s current oil and gas production. Emissions intensities are estimated from upstream extraction, midstream refining, downstream transport, and end-use combustion. Greater transparency is urgently needed to expand beyond the publicly available data used in this current assessment of 135 global oil and gas resources.

We can only manage what we know. The OCI+ is one tool in the decision-maker’s tool kit that can help companies, policymakers, investors, and civil society combat climate change together in the decisive decade of the 2020s.