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Deborah Gordon, "No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World" (Oxford UP, 2021)
00:46:28
An interview with Deborah Gordon
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Caleb Zakrin
I'm Caleb Zakrin, the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network, and you're listening to New Books in Environmental Studies. Today I'm speaking with Deborah Gordon, Senior Principal in the Climate Intelligence Program at rmi, where she heads the Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative. Deborah is also a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University. Her new book, no Standard Oil Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World from Oxford University Press builds on her research developing the Oil Climate Index plus Gas, or oci, the first ever analytic tool that compares the life cycle climate impacts of global oil and gas resources. No Standard Oil is a fantastic overview of the inner workings of the oil and gas industry. Deborah's knowledge and expertise allows her to effectively communicate the complexity of the industry and offer practical solutions for combating climate change.
- [02:24]
Hi Deborah, welcome to the New Books Network.
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Deborah Gordon
So nice to be here, Kayla.
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Caleb Zakrin
First question I'd like to ask you is if you could just tell us a little bit about your background and how you became interested in studying this topic.
- [02:36]
Deborah Gordon
Yeah, so I mean, I don't know if this affects other people, but the world you grow up in often is what piques your curiosity about what you're going to do with your life. And I grew up in the first and second oil crises back in the 70s. In fact, I got my driver's license during the second oil crisis. And so when I went on to the University of Colorado for undergrad, I was really interested in energy and environment. I mean, everyone was talking about where we are today, really high oil prices, what's going to happen, renewables. We're a little bit back to the future, I must say. So I actually studied chemical engineering. Really interest, worked in a hydrogen catalysis lab, was all excited about hydrogen as an alternative fuel. Again, this is back in 1977-1982, a long time ago, but very similar to the conversations we're having today. After studying that, I graduated when the price plummeted. This is a very volatile market. You've seen it over and over again. And the conditions change and the policies change and the awareness has changed. And when I graduated, all of these alternative fuels I was studying in college, the hydrogen lab I worked in dried up. It all went into the valley of death. And I decided to take a job at Chevron doing more environmental permitting and environmental work, which is how my book starts talking about that whole first chapter of my life. But after five years at Chevron, I realized I wanted to understand how this oil industry thinks because I had a sense seeing that valley, you know, the kind of the up and the down, like that roller coaster ride I was on during my before and during college years. I was really interested to understand their thought process and how they made decisions because I had a sense it would never go away or it wouldn't easily go away. Oil and gas would be here for a very long time, and you had to get as smart as they were. So that was. I went back to graduate school in public policy at UC Berkeley. It was the blending of the chemical engineering and the public policy that I think creates the launchpad for everything I've done since, including the book.
- [04:52]
Caleb Zakrin
In the book, you do start off with that great story about working as a chemical engineer. When you start talking about oil, you first begin by talking about a big misconception, which is that many people believe that we are running out of oil. Tell me the story behind this myth and why people believe it and what the actual fact of the matter is.
- [05:17]
Deborah Gordon
Yeah, well, I could say it in really simple terms. During the COVID outbreak, in the beginning, if you remember, we ran out of toilet paper. We didn't run out of toilet paper, really. The supply chain was broken on toilet paper. I think that a lot of people confuse the supply chain of oil and gas. Know what's the price on your corner, at your corner gas station? How available is it? When I was growing up with their lines at the pump, those things make people think that we're running out of things, when the reality is we live in a complex world with a lot of movement. Oil and gas is like the showcase for movement. It goes around the world sometimes two or three times before the final product gets to you. And that is confused that. That supply shortage in the moment is confused with what's under the ground. Not even under the ground, actually, extraterrestrially as well. Asteroids and comets and Saturn. I mean, there are hydrocarbons in the universe. So the reality is, physically, we'll never, ever run out of oil and gas. But pretending like we are stops us from dealing with the full market of the supply and demand of oil and gas. We can't fix this by just demanding less. It will have to be the whole market of supply and demand that we adjust and change. That means addressing the fact that oil and gas are abundant.
- [06:43]
Caleb Zakrin
Now, before reading this, I must admit I probably knew about as much of oil and gas as the typical person. And I really believed that oil in one place was the same as oil in another place. Just going off of your title. No, Standard Oil. And this idea of standard oil coming from Rockefeller, this idea that Standard Oil, it's all the same homogenous product. What is the reality with oil? How oil is different and what is the impact that these differences have on the climate?
- [07:22]
Deborah Gordon
Yeah, so it is the premise of the whole book. I mean, I started this endeavor when I was at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace starting at about 2010. And what started to happen was as more and more unconventional oil and gas was coming out of the ground, this was fracking, this was more oil sands. It was like a light bulb went off in my head. And I realized that if the chemistry and the physics of these resources are that different, I mean, I can't tell you peanut butter is oil sands and nail polish remover is fracked oil. These are really different things. If they are that different, then it stood to reason that the climate impacts would be that different. And it's not even just the sheer physical nature that's so different. If you look at Russia's war with Ukraine right now, there are very different operating conditions in different places, even where oils might be the same or very different. And that means these differences multiply sometimes a factor of 2 or 3x in terms of the full life cycle, from the ground all the way to Your tank, your gas tank, between one oil that you might take or one gas that you might put into your furnace and another oil or gas can be a difference of two or three different. There's a lot of emissions reductions hidden in place by paying attention to the fact that there are these major differences in emissions between oil and gases and, and we have the ability to reduce the emissions if we know where they are.
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Caleb Zakrin
Can you give some examples of different types of oil and gas and how they might differ? For example, in your book you talk about working at a California based oil field. How did that oil differ from oil somewhere else?
- [09:19]
Deborah Gordon
That was really interesting because this was offshore California and the project I was permitting. By the way, that platform is being decommissioned in the moment. No one ever talked about it. Again, this is like 1984, 1985. No one ever talked about the fact that that California oil and a lot of California oil is more like oil sands. It's very tarry and solid. It's not conventional like Saudi Arabian crude. No one ever talked about that. We all talked about it, even in the industry. Like it's oil, it's one thing. But the differences come out in very interesting ways. That the heaviest oils have too much carbon in them. And in order to turn and by heavy oil I mean kind of like either solid, like an oil sand up in Canada, tar sand, or even just an extra heavy, gloppy, tarry, thick oil that they have too much carbon in them. All oil and gas are hydrogen and carbon. And the thicker they are, the heavier they are, the weightier they are, the more carbon they have. But in order to turn them into things like gasoline and diesel and jet fuel and plastic bottles and pajamas, all the things we use for oil, you have to remove a lot of that carbon. There's too much carbon for all of the petrochemical products that we need them for. All of that carbon, it's very energy intensive. To extract heavier oil, it weighs a lot. And to refine heavier oil, there's a lot more CO2 that comes out of barrel of heavy oil that has to be extracted and shipped and then refined. Then on the other extreme, you have very, very light oils or wet gases and condensates. Those are things that have too much hydrogen basically in them and they're too light. So what the risk there when you're going through the whole supply chain is they have a lot of methane. And that methane is a very potent greenhouse gas and it tends to leak along the value chain. And that leakage of methane contributes in outsized Ways to climate change depending on the oil of the gas. Some oils also require a lot of inputs to get them out of ground. I'm thinking some of these fields, say in Indonesia and also California, you have to inject steam, but you make the steam by boiling water. With natural gas, there's a lot of emissions that come out of the ground. Basically the bottom line is, and it was part of the Rockefeller vertical integration of this whole industry and his brainchild, there's a lot of the use of oil and gas to extract and process oil and gas. In other words, a lot of emissions and a lot of use of oil and gas happens before we, the consumer, ever see a product. And that's the big transformation I think that the industry could make now, which is to not use oil and gas to make oil and gas, not use diesel engines, not use natural gas pneumatics, not use their own product, which is too valuable and it's too impactful for the climate to waste it, to use renewables and to use a whole different way as we work to get off of oil and gas, you can make a really big change in affairs by just not using oil and gas to make gasoline, to make diesel, to make plastic bottles.
- [12:50]
Caleb Zakrin
Something that you discuss in the book is two different approaches, demand side approaches and supply side approaches. What are the difference between these two approaches to curbing emissions?
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Deborah Gordon
Yeah, when we came out of the first two oil crises, and this is the conversation in Europe right now, when there's a supply shortage and it looks like supply is limited in the moment, the only thing that policymaker and civil society and public have at their disposal is use less, go on a diet austerity. That's the demand side approach, which is basically consumers rule. They can decide what's moving through the global economy by their consumption habits. That works in a minute. Like now, where you just don't have supply. You have to use less, the price is spiking, you have to get, you know, you have to tighten your belt. The problem is that that isn't the normal market. The normal market is, and we'll be back there again. The normal market is there's plenty of supply. And so the supply side approach has to complement in a full equilibrium market, the supply side approach has to complement to say how the industry actually brings that commodity to market matters. What is the price, what is the emissions impact, how close climate intensive is the product? What are they doing before it gets to the delivery point where I consume it? And for so long we've focused on using less or Being more efficient or buying an electric vehicle. And those are all necessary, but they're not sufficient because the market, what ends up happening is it's a cycle of the market that makes the market work so well to our benefit because we don't have market crashes all the time, which is the more you use, the higher the price. The higher the price moderates how much you use. The higher the price, the less you use, the less the price, the more, the more the demand. The more the demand, the more is the supply. The more the supply, the higher the price. It's just you get this pendulum that swings back and forth to regulate the market through prices. And that's why you need supply and demand to affect a market as durable as oil and gas.
- [15:05]
Caleb Zakrin
This is maybe a tangential question, but it was something that I was thinking about in relation to current events while reading the book is that obviously oil prices are becoming increasingly higher. And there's been debates recently about whether or not we should tap into our oil reserves. And something I was thinking about in it that you talk about is this idea that high prices drive exploration. Are high prices for oil potentially might potentially lead to exploration for more unconventional hydrocarbons that might have worse climate impact. Like is mitigating prices in the short term, actually in the long term good for the climate?
- [15:51]
Deborah Gordon
Yeah, it's a big problem because high prices do two things that are counter to each other. They create the signal for less demand. People will drive less, they'll buy an electric vehicle, they'll make certain choices, the industry will get more efficient. But high prices also drive the desire, the profitability of finding more hydrocarbon. What you need to do, it's not just the market price that really will intercede here. You basically need to price carbon. You need to have an externality price that's not marketing market derived where people will pay less for more impactful oil and gas and for consuming more overall. And we haven't been brave enough to do it. And I feel there's been a lot of talking and Bill Nordhaus won a Nobel Prize for it. Carbon pricing. But I think that there's a real, a very serious problem that we have not dealt with. And it's not just from oil and gas, but it's very much seen in the sector politicians get. The politics of this are very dire because any politician to be reelected cannot give bad news to the public. Bad news is this is going to cost us, this is going to be more expensive, this isn't going to be easy, this is going to be hard but it's worth it because we want to protect ourselves, we want to protect our future generations, and we want to have more stability in our climate and less disruption overall. Fires, floods, et cetera. It's a very hard message for a politician to deliver. I really don't think in my lifetime I've ever seen. Maybe when we're going to war, is about the only time when you can give, like one of those, you know, Rosie the Welder, you know, like, go, go. And, you know, give up your life to do something and sacrifice. It's a very hard one. I'm looking very intently at Germany right now. I feel like so goes Germany, goes the world in terms of can Germany, who's dependent on Russian gas and oil and has a war at their doorstep basically near the border, and is very industrialized, very wealthy and very innovative. And they've been talking about an energy transition for a very long time. So can they actually do this? Are the politicians brave enough to do what needs to be done on the.
- [18:25]
Caleb Zakrin
Point of carbon pricing? Obviously, in order to do this effectively, we need to know the data. And as you said in the 80s, nobody was talking about the climate emissions of different types of carbon. So can you talk a little bit about the oil climate index plus gas, or let's just call it the OCI plus for short, this data analytic tool that you've created.
- [18:51]
Deborah Gordon
Yeah. So about 10 years ago, while I was at the Carnegie Endowment, I hosted an unconventional oil symposium. It was about 2012, and unconventionals were coming out of the ground. Shale gas fracked oil, oil sands were coming like mad to the US all of this was really flowing. And that's when I asked this question we discussed earlier. Well, how different are the emissions if the resources are that different, just fundamentally. So I approached one of the panelists at that event, Adam Branch, who's a professor at Stanford. He had developed a model called OPTG that's used today for the low carbon fuel standard in California. That model was really looking at how much different are the emissions for gasoline and diesel, two major fuels, based on those upstream emissions for getting that oil out of the ground. And I said to him, this is great. I'm really glad you did this. I'm interested not in the fuel emissions looking backward. I want to analyze the oil and gas emissions looking forward through the whole supply chain. He thought that was a great idea. And we forged a research partnership and brought in a third party, Jewel Bergeson, who's a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Calgary. She had a refining Model brought in another colleague of ours then at Stanford, Jonathan Kumi. The four of us developed the Oil Climate Index. Originally it didn't include gas expressly it was in there, but very weakly. So now with the Oil Climate Index plus gas oci, it's both oil and gas. But basically what these models do, it's a series of models that assess through engineering analytics, they assess in a mass balanced way how much energy and therefore how many emissions it takes to get the oil and gas out of the ground. Process it, then put it in pipelines, then put refine it and then consume it. So it's the whole emissions from the ground all the way to end use consumption. It turns out we've started the first OCI was published in 2015 at the Carnegie Endowment. There's a web tool that goes along with it. We tested 25 oils. We could. It's very hard to get very basic data like what is a field producing, how much oil is coming out of the ground? A very basic question. It's not sensitive secret information. It's hard to get these information. A very big stumbling block ultimately has always been transparency. This world is very opaque just to get basic information. But we moved from 25 oils to 75 oils and the same results held that we're talking a factor of two or more in life cycle emissions. Any one oil or gas in terms of their production could be over a factor of 10x in the emissions, refining 10x in the emissions. Big differences between oil A, oil B, or the processing of this way and the processing of that way. So now at rmi, we're updating it in the midst of updating it. And we're looking in the hundreds of oils and gases to be run through the most updated. These models continually get updated and improved upon. They're open source, anyone can use them. And the idea here is that we really want policymakers, civil society, industry investors to have this information because that's the only way. Like for example, if we were brave enough to do a carbon price, even if we were brave enough and we priced all oil the same, we would be missing so many emissions benefits because it would just be saying that everyone pays the same amount at the gas pump, as opposed to when you track the emissions through the whole life cycle. Some gasoline cost 10 times more than other gasoline. So it really has to be borne out through the whole life cycle because that's how you get the industry to compete in a way that they'll reduce their emissions.
- [23:01]
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- [24:30]
Caleb Zakrin
This discussion of industry players, can you tell us a little bit about some of the different major industry players and their efforts to address some of these climate concerns?
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Deborah Gordon
I think this is really confusing to policymakers and the public. You often will read a story about the industry and the boogeyman of this industry and labeled there as Exxon, as if ExxonMobil is the oil industry. The reality is that 80% of all the world's oil and gas production is done by national oil companies. Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Russia, Brazil. It's not done by the public companies that have boards and answer to shareholders. That's one very big misconception. But even then, beneath that is a huge cadre of actors that are part of this industry. Whether they're service providers, whether they're data providers, whether they are the investors, whether they're institutional investors and banks, or whether they're even individual master limited partnerships that you might even have put money away or your parents put money away in an mlp. This master limited partnership and it's funding an oil company that you've never heard of. There are wildcatters, there are independent producers, there are refiners that are part of Major oil companies, the refiners that you've probably never heard the name of, like Tesoro. So it's a very complicated industry with many, many thousands of actors. I've kind of argued that the refining sector is probably the single best place to focus any policy attention because it's a bit of the link between the producer and the consumer. Because none of us. If I gave you as a gift for your birthday, a barrel of oil, it would be worth what, $120? It's nice gift. You can't do anything with it, nothing. It would sit in your backyard and just age and turn to sludge. That's very nice to have you. The refiner turns all of that thing that costs so much but has no value to anyone into all of the things that we use. Everything in your day, your toothpaste, your pajamas, your soap, your shampoo, your plastic bottle, the road, the tires on your car or your bicycle, everything is from that oil. And so I've often argued that the refining sector is very much overlooked. Everyone talks about the producer, the refining sector. There are only 600 refineries in the whole world. In the world. And so the idea of being able to change and transform this industry rides a lot on the refining sector. But no one wants to talk about refining.
- [27:27]
Caleb Zakrin
I'm based in New York. Obviously as a New Yorker, I don't have a car. But if I were to go and drive into New Jersey and go to the pumpkin where the oil that I am getting, where would it have been refined? Would it have been refined somewhere in America or could it possibly be refined somewhere else?
- [27:44]
Deborah Gordon
Both. Here's the biggest myth too. There's so many myths in this thing. I only wrote about a handful of myths in the book, but really there are so many myths and it's. It's almost impossible. I mean, I don't even fault the public for not understanding that much about the sector, because I just think that it's shrouded in myths. It looks like because we are like the number one or two world's producer of oil, we are rivaled by Saudi Arabia and Russia that it looks like we're independent and we can self sustain. The reality is we can't even refine the oil we produce. It's too light. The refineries were all remade to handle very heavy oil in the 2010s, and now we're kind of fracking very light oil. It's almost like putting your soup on a stovetop set at way too high, way too high a temperature. And In a minute flat, it's going to boil off and you're going to have like a burnt pot. So these refineries are set with way, way too much energy and heat and steam to deal with these light oils. And so the reality is we export a lot of the oil we produce. We trade oil, say, with Mexico. We take their, their oil, their heavy oil into our refineries and give them our light oils for their refineries. So the reality is, and even in, you know, if you were to drive to Jersey and fill up your tank, there is no telling where that gasoline came from. It could have come and it changes a lot with arbitrage. It could have come from nearby, one of the few refineries left in the Northeast. It could have been imported from the uk. It could have been imported from Latin America, most likely. We do a lot of gas product trading with Latin America. They have a lot of oil, but they don't have a lot of refining. We have a lot of oil that's not right for us and we have a lot of refining. So we take oil. California is a great example. So oil dependent, large state, very wealthy. California imports 75% of its oil. It has no sense. And Texas exports a lot of its oil and refines a lot of imported oil. The idea of this movement of oil and gas is another interesting one, because unless and until it's transparent and you really have it, I mean, ultimately at rmi, we're working to digitize this. So ultimately in Jersey, when you go to that pump, someday you will know where that came from and it will change. And so you can behave, you can say, well, I'm not filling up here, I'm going over there.
- [30:13]
Caleb Zakrin
Wow, that's incredibly fascinating. The two other players at the table of the oil debate, besides the industry that you talk about are government and civil society. What role do you see the government playing? Let's start with just talking about the US Government in particular, and then international bodies, what role that they can play in addressing these issues.
- [30:46]
Deborah Gordon
First, I want to be very optimistic. There are so many tools in the toolbox here. It's just a matter of will we use them. Things are breaking little by little in the house. And are we going to fix things up or are we not going to fix things up? Is more of the question. But in terms of policymakers, I divide the world and I do this in the chapter. I divide the world into two basic, simplified worlds. The world of oil and gas takers and the world of oil and gas makers. The takers are importing, they don't have resources themselves and the makers are exporting to the rest of those in the world. What makes you us unique is it's both. It's what I was just explaining to you. It's not just a taker and it's not just a maker. We're the world's largest producer and refiner. We're also the world's largest consumer and those things don't always balance. So we're a little bit the revolving door of this whole thing. I often think, like if we could really think of a solution here, we would solve it for the takers and the makers. Because when you get to makers, it gets very fraught. If you're Russia, if you're Saudi Arabia, if you're Brazil, even Australia, you're a maker. Canada is another example. You're a maker. You consume a lot less than you make. So your whole financial prospect of your country, your GDP has a lot of oil and gas in it and it's hard to give that up. I mean this is not only do you get royalties when it comes out of the ground, you also get a lot of money when you sell it on the marketplace. So the idea of how you actually transform the idea of how you actually transform a maker society is tough. Now we have some help in that. This turns out the Saudis, the Norwegians and maybe the Texas Frackers have the lowest emissions intensity oil and gas in the world. So some of these makers, the Saudis might be willing to change the terms of engagement and say we're not just selling oil anymore, we're selling lower intensity, lower emissions intensity oil and create a new benchmark that isn't just based on volume the barrel, it's based on how many emissions per barrel you get a premium. If then the tapers in the world, like China as an example, decide it's worth combating climate change to turn themselves in a buyer's way toward lower intensity oil. That could change the whole state of affairs that we have here without even having a express carbon tax. I included Texas in that because I think that if the Texas frackers don't leak their methane, they become Race to the Top, some of the lowest emissions intensity oil the Norwegians already are. There are some real natural winners here. As we get off oil but still use some, we could do this in a really smart way. Russia's terrible. They won't be anytime soon part of that race to the top. But they also use oil revenue for not great things like we're seeing now in Ukraine. So there might be some ancillary benefits to work thinking in climate ways about this because we might disempower some of the other oil regimes that don't necessarily that use their oil for things that aren't so good for society.
- [34:16]
Caleb Zakrin
Now, I know so many people, you know, myself included, who are very concerned about the future prospects for climate change. And I think a overwhelming feeling that I hear from a lot of people is a sort of pessimism and a sense of despair and this feeling of what, what can they do as individuals? So what would your recommendation be to just the average person who doesn't know much about the actual science behind oil but is concerned about climate change?
- [34:51]
Deborah Gordon
I really think it lies in education. I don't think it's about answers. I think it's about learning how to ask the right questions. I thought that for a long time. I remember when I was raising, we were raising our kids, there was just a lot of trying to get them to see the problem and then ask the right questions so that they weren't just grabbing onto a simple solution. Because most of the hardest problems are baked into a system. So you have to get really smart about understanding the system dynamics because what you don't want to do is spend a lot of effort, say, I'll give you an example, buying an electric vehicle, which is fantastic because it's no tailpipe and the city will be cleaner because of you. That's fantastic. But for climate change, an electric vehicle only helps if that displaced gasoline that you're not using isn't. If those molecules don't make something worse, they might make fuel oil that goes into a power station that you plug in and recharge your vehicle with. And now your vehicle is worse. So asking those kinds of questions and being not just campaigning on simple slogans, but really understanding these issues, I say to everyone and every parent and every child out there, take chemistry and take economics. To me, they are the two most important things to understand dynamics. Because the world is a dynamic place and any one thing we do is going to have a reaction and we want to always be prepared for the.
- [36:21]
Caleb Zakrin
Unintended consequence going off of that. You say, I think that's great advice, telling people to focus on questions rather than answers. I think even my, my job as the assistant editor at New Books Network, basically what I do is I just ask questions. So I'm trying to be comfortable with just asking questions and, you know, not being, not, not just having answers. So you do outline several solutions and you've already Discussed several ideas. But what are, you know, if you were deciding some of the things that we can do, what would, what would your advice be from both a policy perspective and then also from, from a business perspective if you were heading an oil company, for example?
- [37:10]
Deborah Gordon
Well, I don't know that an oil company would say this, but I would say that investors would say this because they're with esg, environmental, social, governance concerns out there. There's a lot more money going into things that are less bad these days. That the idea of being able to pinpoint and reduce oil and gas industry emissions I think is critical understanding. Again, the OCI and this typ of information that you can get where you recognize that even though oil looks like it's all the same, it's not. And you have to be very smart about what you invest in. I think that that's one opportunity. The other idea, so, so many in my head, but another idea is this idea of substituting renewables into the oil and gas supply chain. What it does is it not only reduces emissions in the immediate term, it cross trains the workforce and it capitalizes renewables on the back of oil and gas companies, which really need to be much more energy companies in the future. I'm also really excited about the whole prospect. Again, it's been how many generation of hydrogen coming back into the fold. We started the conversation with that, but the idea of thinking about hydrogen and green hydrogen in this whole because again, these are hydrocarbon companies. Why do they need the carbon, why do they need the methane? They could have a whole industry on hydrogen. So that's another thing the idea of, and I do think that the investors could do this and so can journalists and the public. The whole idea of tracking asset transfers, you know, more and more the more volatile this world is and the oil and gas industry has been and is even more volatile now than it has ever been. The idea that these assets transfer between companies and no one even knows whose asset it is in the moment and when it is at the end of its life whose it was. The idea of exposing those risks along the way and having that be transparent and knowing whether when the asset transfers did the emissions go up. Like if I sold you my house, you do an inspection before you bought it and you'd make sure I repaired my roof because otherwise you'd pay less for my house. It's the same idea with oil. If I'm going to sell you a dud of an an asset that has very high emissions and needs a lot of work on it, then I should know about that. I should be really smart about it. The idea of accounting for additional emissions. This whole slew of satellites are going up as we speak. There are several up now that spot methane and new ones are going up. We're working with Carbon Mapper, which is a NASA, California Air Resources Board, Planet consortium. They are going to spot a lot of emissions that aren't inventoried. We don't even know they're there. These are the emissions that the industry is not assuming they have because either they're because of upsets or they're because of maintenance, or they're because of bad actors that aren't really being honest about what they're doing. And those additional missions, I think, are going to change. They're going to become visible. They're going to change everything we know about climate change. And so being part of journalists will definitely pick up on this. But being part of the public and investors and industry that pay attention to that information, I think is going to be critical. And then I guess the last one, it's what I told you about my Chevron project from years back, is being decommissioned. The last one is not every oil asset should operate forever. They need to stop. There's a point at which you're emitting more emissions, then you're actually delivering energy to the public. And the UK Brent Fields is being decommissioned, which is really historic to me, because the whole Brent basket, that's the other value basket that's compared to West Texas Intermediate. It was called the Brent Basket. But the Brent platforms, there are four of them, they're all going away. The Last1of4 is about to be removed from the ocean in the uk, in the North Sea. So the idea of getting ahead of decommissioning and knowing when the emissions get so bad, either fix it or turn it off. I think that there are a lot of things that are available to do quickly in this sector as we work to get off oil and gas.
- [41:31]
Caleb Zakrin
For someone who reads your book and wants to continue learning more about the oil and gas industry, is there anything else you'd recommend they read or watch or listen to?
- [41:45]
Deborah Gordon
It's interesting once you start to educate yourself and you read. Oh, actually, I'll smile as I say this. There were 12 books. Mine was only one of the 12 that was just highlighted by Yale Climate Connections. So people can go there and look at the 12 books. And they were all on oil, climate and the economy. And I know, like, for the authors, I recommend all of the books, so that might be interesting. But once You've read enough of these books. Read no Standard Oil, read the other books on that list. Really every single day in the newspaper is a story or ten stories about oil and gas, either in the front page or the first, you know, the first section or even in the business section, whatever newspaper you pick up. I get the New York Times every day. But in every, in every newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, LA Times. Once you know what you're, once you understand and have debunked some of the myths in this, this sector, you will read those stories differently and you'll understand. It's like up here we go on the roller coaster again. I understand what's happening. This is what's going to happen. Oh, we need to talk about this. And if you're someone who's an activist, you know, you can call your senator and talk about these things and make them more aware of making those really difficult decisions on oil and gas in a more mindful way. You could talk to like if you're a shareholder in a company, you could talk to, you know, or if you're, you know, you have your money invested with, you know, I don't know, Charles Schwab. Like you could call them and say, I don't like this. Like you can be, you can vote with your feet. But I think it does start with awareness and information and then that drives more transparency which brings more information. I've always been looking for virtuous cycles in this sector because I think that's how you get out of the hard problems.
- [43:35]
Caleb Zakrin
For someone who's interested in learning more about your work with the OCI that the Oil and Gas Climate Index, would you. Is there anything that anyone can do to either get involved to help with this project or any ways in which you'd recommend people use this tool?
- [43:54]
Deborah Gordon
Yeah, well, I would definitely say the OCI will be released. I'm thinking it will be out this summer with these about 100 plus oils and gases all modeled. We RMI is also part of a coalition called Climate Trace and we've input all the results from the oil climate index runs and we're updating those in Climate Trace. That platform is live right now. It launched in September of this past year and it was like one of TIME's Best 100 Inventions of the year. Definitely go on the Climate Trace platform. I would say we've thought a lot about crowdsourcing more and more of this open source information to get it out there. So just reach out out RMI if and you could follow us on RMI emissions and just, you know, get involved. But if anyone's interested in the oci, once it comes out, it will be broadcast very broadly and there'll be webinars and it will be. The tool will be. It's open source, so it will be there making, you know, your elected officials aware of it and aware of the need for more transparency, because that is what they can legislate, I think will be really helpful. Helpful too.
- [45:03]
Caleb Zakrin
Are you planning on. I know you said that you're about to release in the summer, so that's obviously. Imagine taking some of your time. Are you planning on writing anything else or working on any new projects related to this?
- [45:15]
Deborah Gordon
Yeah, I mean, we write blogs. We just wrote a blog on comparing us to Russian to cutter gas to see how different the emissions intensities are. So that's on RMI's website. We'll be writing a lot of blogs using not just the OCI as a tool, but also just policy impact and market activation with the lessons we've learned. So definitely keep an eye out for all that op EDS and articles. And there's just a lot of information and actually there's been a lot of information since I started the project back in about 2012 to even go back in time and just like type in to find this information because the results have. I'm happy to say the results have been solid. Like what we found in 2012 of these differences in emissions have really borne out in reality. And then we can use that information to help shift decisions along the way.
- [46:07]
Caleb Zakrin
Deborah, thank you so much for being on New Books Network. This was a great discussion and hopefully people found it interesting. I certainly found this book very fascinating and I really do recommend it as a great introduction to understanding the role of oil and gas in climate today. So thank you so much, Deborah.
- [46:28]
Deborah Gordon
It's such a pleasure. Caleb, take care.
- [46:45]
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