{"id":8869,"date":"2023-11-27T12:25:48","date_gmt":"2023-11-27T12:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/roydadnaft.ir\/English\/?p=8869"},"modified":"2023-11-27T12:27:01","modified_gmt":"2023-11-27T12:27:01","slug":"us-oil-and-gas-production-set-to-break-record-in-2023-despite-un-climate-goals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roydadnaft.ir\/English\/8869\/","title":{"rendered":"US oil and gas production set to break record in 2023 despite UN climate goals"},"content":{"rendered":"

RoydadNaft – <\/a><\/span>\u00a0United States projected to extract 12.9m barrels of crude oil as countries at Cop28 to push for agreed fossil fuels \u2018phaseout\u2019.<\/p>\n

The United States is poised to extract more oil and gas than ever before in 2023, a year that is certain to be the hottest ever recorded, providing a daunting backdrop to crucial United Nations climate talks that hold the hope of an agreement to end the era of fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

The US\u2019s status as the world\u2019s leading oil and gas behemoth has only strengthened this year, even amid warnings from Joe Biden himself over the unfolding climate crisis, with the latest federal government forecast showing a record 12.9m barrels of crude oil, more than double what was produced a decade ago, will be extracted in 2023.<\/p>\n

Records will also be broken this year for gas production, with a glut of new export terminals on the Gulf of Mexico coast facilitating a boom that will see US exports of liquified natural gas (or LNG) double in the next four years.<\/p>\n

Tellingly, the US government expects this frenzy of oil and gas activity to continue at near-record levels right up to 2050, a point at which scientists say planet-heating emissions must be eliminated to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown. A third of the world\u2019s planned oil and gas expansion in this period will occur in the US, a recent report found.<\/p>\n

At the Cop28 climate summit, starting in Dubai this week, the European Union and a cadre of \u201chigh ambition\u201d countries that range from Kenya to Samoa will push for an agreed \u201cphaseout\u201d of fossil fuels. Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the UN, has called fossil fuel production the \u201cpoisonous root\u201d of the climate crisis that should be dismantled. \u201cCop28 must send a clear signal that the fossil fuel age is out of gas, that its end is inevitable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The US\u2019s surging fossil fuel production casts a pall over such ambitions, however. \u201cIt\u2019s particularly alarming to see the projections of record US oil and gas production year after year until 2050,\u201d said Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at Stockholm Environment Institute, which helped produce a recent UN report finding the world is planning double the amount of fossil fuel production consistent with remaining within a 1.5C (2.7F) global temperature rise compared to pre-industrial times.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe US is locking in production for years that makes it hard to meet climate goals,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s out of sync and it needs reckoning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under Biden, the US has passed its first major climate legislation, called the Inflation Reduction Act, which has spurred record investment in clean energy such as solar and wind, as well as propel sales of electric vehicles.<\/p>\n

The US president\u2019s administration has fashioned new pollution rules to slash emissions from cars, trucks and power plants and recently struck a renewed agreement with China, the only country that emits more carbon than the US, to do more to stem the climate crisis. US energy emissions, meanwhile, have been edging downwards and are expected to drop 3% this year, albeit at a slower rate than needed to meet its own climate goals.<\/p>\n

But the proliferation of domestic oil and gas drilling has alarmed scientists and some of Biden\u2019s allies, who fret that it undermines efforts to avert a looming 3C in global heating that Guterres has described as \u201chellish\u201d.<\/p>\n

Jeff Merkley, a Democratic senator from Oregon, said US negotiators will be \u201cunable to lead the phaseout of fossil fuels\u201d at Cop28. \u201cNot only do we produce more oil and gas than any other country, but Team Biden is green lighting one fossil project after another,\u201d said Merkley. \u201cThe US is devoid of any moral authority to phasing out fossil fuels.\u201d<\/p>\n

The increased fossil fuel production, which Biden championed last year as a way to tamp down gasoline prices for US drivers and to support overseas allies in the wake of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, also risks burdening disadvantaged communities living next to polluting infrastructure and threatens to alienate younger, climate-conscious voters ahead of next year\u2019s presidential election, an advisor to the White House has cautioned.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey say they want to be leaders on climate but then do the opposite,\u201d said Jerome Foster, a climate activist and member of the White House environmental justice advisory council. \u201cIt\u2019s a mixed record and it\u2019s really sad to see. President Biden said he would be the climate president but we aren\u2019t seeing that. He\u2019s not keeping his promises, he\u2019s not got gen Z\u2019s back.\u201d<\/p>\n

The US delegation to the Cop28 summit \u2013 Biden is not expected to attend this year \u2013 has indicated it would support agreement language that calls for the phase out of fossil fuels that are unabated by measures such as carbon capture technology. Officials led by John Kerry, the US climate envoy, admit the exact phrasing may have to be \u201ccreative\u201d to gain the consensus of nearly 200 countries, which include other major oil producers such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

\u201cA US priority will be how to catalyze action to keep to 1.5C (2.7F), and there are going to be lots of conversations with countries to phrase that in a way that makes the most sense,\u201d said Nate Hultman, a former aide to Kerry, now an expert in climate policy at the University of Maryland. \u201cBut we have a dynamic that feels awkward, of how to reconcile the world we are living in, that\u2019s heavily fossil fuel-driven, with the vision of a clean non-emitting world. That\u2019s the tension.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if such a phaseout declaration is made in Dubai, there is little certainty it will be swiftly fulfilled within the voluntary Cop process. A previous agreement to \u201cphase down\u201d coal use, at a Cop meeting in Scotland in 2021, was followed a year later by the UK allowing the creation of a new coal mine. Multiple new coal plants continue to spring up in China, meanwhile, despite Kerry agitating for the country\u2019s coal use to be curbed.<\/p>\n

Halting the use of fossil fuels, the primary cause of the climate crisis, has been elusive in three decades\u2019 of international climate talks, with major producers now planning a major ramp-up even in the face of escalating heatwaves, floods, droughts and other climate change-fueled disasters.<\/p>\n

Biden may have provided a popular boost to renewable energy in the US, but displacing a firmly entrenched fossil fuel industry via a carbon tax or other regulations remains a political no-go area, beyond a fee charged for waste emissions of methane, a potent planet-heating gas.<\/p>\n

Instead, Biden has been handing out oil and gas drilling leases on public lands at a rate comparable to Donald Trump, with the emissions from 17 large projects permitted by his administration, including the controversial Willow oil complex in Alaska, set to cause more than 3.2bn tonnes of greenhouse gases over their lifetime, a new report by the Center for Biological Diversity calculated.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the Inflation Reduction Act didn\u2019t do in any way was disincentivize the use of fossil fuels \u2013 it was all carrots and no sticks,\u201d said Kelly Gallagher, a former climate advisor to Barack Obama\u2019s administration and now interim dean at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. \u201cIf the US had done this 20 years ago, it would be a great approach to grow clean energy first before reducing fossil fuel production. But we have very little time now.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s difficult is that we are in an election year now and it\u2019s unlikely that President Biden is going to take steps to hasten the decline of fossil fuels in the US.\u201d<\/p>\n

For large oil and gas companies, Cop28 does not yet appear to be a death knell. The summit\u2019s president Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, chief executive of Adnoc, the national oil company of the United Arab Emirates, has talked enthusiastically about working with industry to phase down emissions, rather than scrap the central business model of oil and gas extraction itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope would be that you start to see more emphasis put on a problem statement of eliminating emissions, versus a problem statement focused on the oil and gas industry per se,\u201d Darren Woods, chief executive of Exxon, said this month.<\/p>\n

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