Abbreviations

MEASUREMENTS

OTHER ABBREVIATIONS

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 largest-ever 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 smog-forming 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 wide-ranging climate impacts of oil and gas resources? How can we get stakeholders to work together? Is there a better course for energy and environmental decision-making 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 (NOCs)—state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America—are now estimated to control more than 85 percent of the global oil and gas market.³⁸ And new actors continue to gain footholds, including independent producers and refiners, shippers, traders, limited partnerships, and financial firms.

The shifting fortunes and changing roster of the oil and gas industries’ major players are an important consideration. The diverse and globalized ecosystem of oil and gas enterprises is often called on to take full responsibility for its role in contributing to climate change. But it is not clear exactly who is in charge, both because the market is highly decentralized and because the biggest players of the past and the present are not the same. Even if that were not the case, oil and gas assets can change hands many times over a project’s lifetime, so it is not always evident how responsibility for climate-related externalities should be apportioned to the various firms involved in a given project over its lifetime. In addition to the example of Point Arguello, with its revolving door of partners, consider the difficulty allocating lifetime GHGs for the Martinez refinery (the third largest in California) where nine different companies (large and small) have come and gone since its operations commenced in 1913.³⁹ For these reasons, it is not enough and not always feasible to pursue individual companies when it is the oil and gas resources themselves that endure and continue to damage the climate.

Reality #5: Governments Face Conflicting Incentives

Chevron followed government regulators’ marching orders on a litany of requirements. The firm was expected to protect monarch butterflies, kelp beds, fishing sites, and raptor roosts; safeguard Chumash Native American sacred sites; secure coastal access for public hiking; relocate a local public school; placate armed ranchers along the pipeline route; avoid interfering with nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base; continuously monitor for releases of deadly hydrogen sulfide; and on and on. The project involved at least five federal, state, and local government agencies, each with a designated charge.⁴⁰

But were these government regulators actually in charge? Or were the budget officials—the state controller, governor, and finance directors—actually pulling the strings? California stood to make a lot of money on Point Arguello. The lease granting drilling rights generated over $1 billion in today’s dollars,⁴¹ and millions more in annual royalties were split between California and the US federal government.⁴² The national, state, and local government actors involved in overseeing such projects may impose specific protections, but they are often pitted against one another and even themselves—working at cross-purposes with larger financial (and political) aims. These tensions are large enough in countries like the United States, but they are even greater in other countries like Iraq, Russia, and Azerbaijan, where oil and gas revenues make up a major share of national budgets.⁴³

Reality #6: Civil Society Demonizes Oil and Gas but Can’t Stop Using Them Either

I was loath to discuss my work in Santa Barbara because it led to intense arguments. So I engaged local residents, posing as a grad student from the University of California, Santa Barbara. I asked them what their biggest concerns were and how they squared those worries with the fact that their every car trip, plane ride, hot shower, makeup application, medical treatment, and house insulation job was made possible by oil and gas. Oil and gas were designated public enemies to be vanquished. Was this the case because they felt their own backyards were at stake?

Outspoken critics of oil and gas never offered up personal austerity measures, which highlights an inconvenient truth: the world is hooked on oil and gas, and cutting back on them will not be easy. Virtually every drop in a barrel of oil is exploited for one purpose or another. Every molecule of hydrocarbons is turned into something that someone, somewhere will buy—or else it is leaked into the air and water or pumped back into the ground. Environmentally conscious civil society is missing an honest conversation about oil and gas and how to actually dial down their climate impacts as we chart the long, winding road to net-zero GHG emissions in the petroleum sector.⁴⁴

An Oil Brain Trust Reunites

As 2020 approached, more of my former Chevron colleagues opted to retire. A light bulb went off in my head: why not reunite those of us who permitted Point Arguello? I imagined that, together, Big Oil retirees with their vast know-how could help the industry move beyond business as usual and do business better. A dozen of us initially connected. We agreed that the oil industry was remiss in its duty to deal with climate change head on. As the earth’s temperature reached new highs, Chevron (and its competitors) were not acting urgently enough to address a colossal problem of their own making.

For three years, we connected by phone, sharing ideas. We cultivated and produced a technical document that identified what we saw as low-hanging fruit—numerous swift actions to leverage assets while improving efficiency, reducing GHG emissions, and cutting costs. A couple of us even published a “how to” climate plan for petroleum companies.⁴⁵ In February 2020, nine of us planned a reunion (seven attended in person). It was amazing to see old work friends and meet others who had picked up the torch after I left Chevron. With collectively some 300 years on the job, our technical and policy wisdom was palpable.

The next day we had an audience with Chevron management. We knew the company could not divulge corporate intel to us, even if we once served in its ranks. At most, we were now only shareholders. (For my part, I am divested.) But we wanted Chevron to hear from us so we could offer up technical solutions and share win-win opportunities to decarbonize their operations. The four guiding principles we discussed apply well beyond Chevron to the oil and gas industry writ large. These recommendations underpin a trailblazing way forward to actually reduce the GHG footprint of the oil and gas industry by leveraging our expertise of the industry itself and working in tandem with established players.

First, oil and gas companies should increase transparency by publicly releasing and routinely updating credible corporate climate plans using open-source lifecycle assessments to evaluate their GHGs.⁴⁶ Second, companies should advocate for GHG pricing on actual, measured, auditable data for all climate pollutants. Third, companies should accept climate responsibility by exiting industry associations that challenge climate science and by rewarding employees for excellent climate performance. And fourth, companies should position themselves on a climate path below 2 degrees Celsius by adopting science-based mitigation targets⁴⁷ and investing in research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) on low-GHG technologies and pathways.⁴⁸

Some of us left the meeting more upbeat than others. But we all agreed that real, concerted change takes perseverance on the part of the industry, government, and civil society. Measurable and durable action is urgently needed. The oil sector is at a turning point and the next decade will make or break its future. The transition from Big Oil (and Big Gas) to Big (Low-Carbon) Energy starts by reducing the climate intensity of the industry’s own operations.

The Problems, the Players, and the Pathways

This story has three parts. The first section details overlooked aspects of the problems that have spawned climate change. Chapters 1 and 2 detail deeply rooted, mistaken patterns of conventional thinking about fossil fuels and the market failures that stand in the way of progress: massive externalities, incomplete knowledge, oligopolistic behavior, and intergenerational inequities. Chapters 3 and 4 introduce and apply a more complete and accurate open-source framework for assessing the climate impact of the world’s diverse array of hydrocarbons—the Oil Climate Index + Gas (OCI+).⁴⁹

For all the awareness, optimism, and determination efforts like the Paris Agreement and the Green New Deal have inspired, even the most well-intentioned policies are often hampered by mistaken assumptions about the nature of the problem, misconceptions that could easily reduce the effectiveness of proposed solutions. This struggle is not a new one. After fifty years of pursuing a coveted, wholesale, low-carbon future powered by renewable energy, the global economy is no closer to reducing its dependence on petroleum than it was a half-century ago. Oil and gas continue to supply the majority of global primary energy (54 percent, compared to renewables at 5 percent) and emit the majority of energy-related GHG emissions.⁵⁰ After all, oil and gas remain highly abundant. And due to their heterogeneous composition, some hydrocarbon resources have far greater impacts on the climate than others. By mistakenly treating diverse oils and gases as homogeneous resources, the world misses real opportunities to reduce emissions now, as the planet dangerously warms.

The main characters of this energy-focused climate saga—industry, government, and civil society—are featured in the book’s second act in chapters 5 through 7. Assorted industry players are as diverse as the oil and gas resources they peddle. They impose sizeable climate footprints even before their products are sold.⁵¹ Despite accidents, attacks, and epidemics, the market directs an ever-changing guard of companies to churn out millions of barrels of oil, gas, and assorted petroleum products a day. Governments are charged with providing public oversight on this well-oiled machine that is changing the climate. While no single government actor has figured out how to stop oil and gas from warming the planet, a varied collection of actors are trying different approaches. And a hodgepodge of civil society actors—nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), philanthropies, academia, think tanks, and the public—are doggedly finding different ways to balance private interests and the public good in a largely uncoordinated fashion.

Those of us with a wealth of experience and expertise on the inner workings of the oil and gas industry can offer vital lessons on how these different actors can overcome these climate change coordination challenges and work better in tandem. Chapter 8 details climate pathways forward, or solutions for the tightly linked oil and gas supply chain, a system that is geared for just-in-time delivery of assorted petroleum products that compose daily life. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Successfully shrinking the climate footprint of the oil and gas sector will take the accumulated results of countless carefully crafted 2 percent solutions. Different actors can fashion different climate tools for the oil and gas sector to monitor, report, and verify GHG emissions levels; forge voluntary agreements and binding regulations; use financial incentives and disincentives; impose sanctions and prohibitions; and foster research, development, and technology transfer.

Greater transparency would help guide strategy development so that industry, governments, and civil society actors can pinpoint opportune targets and play a constructive role. This need gave rise to the OCI+. This first-of-its-kind open-source model quantifies and ranks oil and gas resources by their lifecycle GHGs, identifies where in the supply chain emissions are produced, and informs the design of climate mitigation efforts.

Reducing demand for oil and gas alone will not prevent the climate devastation upon us. We all witnessed how sheltering in place and the initial economic shutdowns during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 eliminated daily commutes and canceled flights, throttling the global oil industry.⁵² While a pandemic temporarily depresses demands for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, atmospheric levels of climate-warming gases are cumulative and will not decrease until more emissions are removed than go into the air year after year for decades to come.⁵³

Supply-side mitigation of oil and gas GHG emissions is imperative to putting the world on a path toward staying below global temperature rises of 2 degrees Celsius. The endgame involves turning the hydrocarbon (oil and gas) sector into a renewable hydrogen enterprise—keeping the carbon underground ex ante. In a world where ongoing threats of new infectious diseases are exacerbated by fossil fuel–driven climate change, the petroleum sector needs a low-carbon business plan.⁵⁴ Capturing and sequestering carbon or employing other climate engineering fixes after oil and gas have been extracted and GHGs emitted will not be enough.

The world cannot wait for oil and gas resources to run out—that simply will not happen. We need to acknowledge that hydrocarbons are extremely complex and mutable. And oil and gas are causing irreparable damage to the global climate. We are long overdue for a clean energy transition. But hydrocarbons have become so pervasive in so many disparate corners of the global economy that no single group—companies, governments, or activists—can root them out alone. Together, the industry, governments, and civil society possess complementary forms of ingenuity needed to develop supply-side oil and gas climate solutions.

Thinking back over the past three-plus decades since my Chevron testimony, I still do not have all the answers. But I know where to look to uncover the unknowns. This book is a shining beacon lighting the way.