World’s first public database on fossil fuels launched

Climate campaigners have launched the world’s first registry of fossil fuel reserves, production, and emissions.

In a statement on Monday, Carbon Tracker and the Global Energy Monitor said the registry was the “first-ever fully transparent” and “public database that tracks fossil fuel production worldwide”.

Named the Global Registry of Fossils Fuels, the inventory includes data from more than 50,000 oil, gas, and coal fields in 89 countries, covering 75 percent of global production. It also makes previously disparate or hard-to-access data publicly available, including to investors, experts, and activists.

Mark Campanale, the founder of Carbon Tracker, said that he hoped the registry would empower groups to hold governments accountable, for example, when they issue licenses for fossil-fuel extraction.

“Civil society groups have got to get more of a focus on what governments are planning to do in terms of license issuance, both for coal and oil and gas, and actually begin to challenge this permitting process,” Campanale said.

The release of the database and an accompanying analysis of the collected data has been timed to coincide with two critical sets of climate talks at the international level – the United Nations General Assembly in New York which began on September 13, and the COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, that will take place in November.

In their analysis of the data, Carbon Tracker and Global Energy Monitor found that the United States and Russia have enough fossil fuel still underground and untapped to exhaust the world’s remaining carbon budget, a term that refers to the remaining carbon the world can afford to emit before a certain amount of warming occurs, in this case,1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 Fahrenheit).

It also shows these reserves would generate 3.5 trillion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than all of the emissions produced since the Industrial Revolution.

Agencies