Existing fossil fuel sites must shut to meet 1.5C limit – study

STOPPING new oil, gas and coal developments is not enough to limit global warming – existing sites will also need to close, a study warns.

The findings published in Environmental Research Letters come after the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned no new coal mines or oil and gas fields can be developed if temperature rises are to be limited to 1.50C.

Now researchers say that, in the absence of large-scale technology to capture emissions from burning fossil fuels, nearly 40% of reserves in existing and approved sites need to stay in the ground to stay within 1.50C of warming. That will mean a large portion of existing fields and mines must be shut before reserves are depleted.

Scientific assessments show that letting global average temperatures climb more than 1.50C above preindustrial levels will lead to increasingly severe droughts, floods, heatwaves, sea level rises, the loss of key natural systems and crop failures, and countries have pledged to try to curb rises to that level.

The team led by researchers from Oil Change International and the International Institute for Sustainable Development used a commercial model of the world’s 25,000 oil and gas fields and built a new dataset on coal mines in the nine largest producing countries for their study.

They estimated there were 936 billion tonnes of “committed emissions” of carbon dioxide that would come from burning the fossil fuels in developed reserves.

These emissions are 60% larger than the remaining budget for the total pollution that can be put into the atmosphere and still keep temperature increases within the 1.50C target.

This level of emissions would also use up all of the budget for keeping temperature rises below 20C – the limit agreed by countries as part of the Paris Agreement.

Almost 90% of developed fossil fuel reserves are located in just 20 countries, led by China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.