Fossil-Fuel Reserves Should Be Kept Unexploited in the Ground for Half-a-Chance of Hitting Less Than 1.5 °C Goal for Global Warming

An updated modeling on fossil-fuel reserves recently showed that almost 90 percent of economically sustainable global coil reserves need to remain untapped in the ground to have even half a chance of hitting internationally agreed goals for climate change.

According to the modeling published in Nature, many planned coal, gas, and oil extraction projects won't be feasible if the world is hoping to reach the warming goal.

To achieve the target, the report's authors said, which is half-a-chance of the remaining less than 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, the more ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris agreement, the world should not release more than 580 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide before 2100.

Under this circumstance, the authors of the model, led by Dan Welsby, an environmental and energy economist at University College London, estimate that 89 percent of coal reserves, more than 50 percent of oil reserves, and over 55 percent of gas reserves need to stay "unextracted."

In addition, the authors also emphasized that even though the circumstance already looks miserable for the worldwide fossil-fuel industry, even tighter restrictions on extractions will be necessitated for the improvement of chances to constrain warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The BBC News report said environment and climate-change economist Frank Jotzo from the Australian National University in Canberra said the study makes the fundamental point that most of the known economic reserves won't be used.

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The Need for Fossil Fuel to Stay Unused

The research builds on a "2015 model" that investigated how much fossil fuel needs to stay unexploited to limit global average temperature increases not higher than two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial periods, a Phys.org report indicated.

Updating the model was essential as the whole discussion has now exceeded two degrees Celsius, being acceptable, explained Welsby adding, two degrees Celsius is extremely considerable warming.

This model captures key fundamental energy sources like fossil fuels, nuclear, biomass, and renewables. It considers demand, economic factors, the resources' geological distribution, and emissions and investigates how such changes change over time.

It incorporates negative-emissions technologies as well, like the removal of carbon dioxide. Welsby, together with his co-authors, estimates that gas and oil production should drop by three percent every year from to date until 2050.

Meaning, fossil-fuel production needs to peak within the next 10 years, and the most existing and planned projects for fossil fuel would not be available, consequently.

Nevertheless, this research showed substantial regional differences in limits on the extraction of fossil fuel, according to carbon intensity, and the cost of using different resources.

A Dangerous Tactic

According to chief scientist Pep Canadell, at the CSIRO Climate Science Centre in Canberra, who has contributed to the assessment reports of the IPCC, the inclusion of the removal of carbon dioxide recognizes the possible scenario that carbon budget is blown out, although then remove adequate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to bring back the temperature down, or even lower than 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels.

Nonetheless, energy economist Nebojsa Nakicenovic said this is such a risky strategy. Nakicenovic, a former chief executive of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, added that overshooting emissions goals and then eliminating the carbon from the atmosphere means the problem is being postponed to the second half of the century. He also said carbon dioxide removal technologies have a long way to go before they become scalable.

Related information about fossil-fuel reserves is shown on Climate One's YouTube Video below:

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