Good Thing - High-Grading Crude Oil Production Assets to Reduce GHG Emissions

RBN Energy Blogcast

There’s a growing acknowledgment in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere that crude oil will remain an important part of our energy future for decades to come. At the same time, however, the drive to decarbonize will continue, and as part of that effort, oil producers will be working to ratchet down their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A lot of that will be achieved through the purchase of carbon offsets or the use of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), but another approach is for producers to “high-grade” their portfolios by divesting production assets that generate inordinately high volumes of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane during production and investing instead in assets with much lower carbon intensity. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the push by some producers to shift to “lower-carbon oil.”