It Pays to Know Your Oil and Gas

This RMI fact sheet introduces the Oil Climate Index plus Gas (OCI+), an interactive web tool designed to model the life-cycle emissions intensity of global oil and gas assets. The document argues that fossil fuel resources vary significantly in their climate footprints and emphasizes the need for high-quality public data and the use of a 20-year global warming potential (GWP20) to accurately assess the impact of methane emissions.

• Life-cycle emissions intensities for oil and gas resources are highly variable, with some resources differing by as much as five times in their climate footprints.
• The oil and gas sector suffers from a significant lack of transparency and data quality, including issues with costly input data that cannot be shared publicly and inconsistent, unverifiable self-reported emissions from countries and companies.
• Reducing supply-side emissions—including production, refining, processing, and shipping—is as critical in the short term as reducing consumer demand, as these emissions can rival those from petroleum end-use consumption.
• Methane reduction is the top priority for the industry because it accounts for more than half of operational emissions and is over 80 times more climate forcing than carbon dioxide over a decade.
• The OCI+ advocates for the use of a 20-year global warming potential (GWP20) to analyze oil and gas, which is particularly relevant as many nations have committed to a 30 percent reduction in methane by 2030.

APA

RMI (2024). It Pays to Know Your Oil and Gas. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2023/03/it_pays_to_know_your_oil_and_gas.pdf

Chicago

RMI. It Pays to Know Your Oil and Gas. 2024. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2023/03/it_pays_to_know_your_oil_and_gas.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=RMI |title=It Pays to Know Your Oil and Gas |date=September 2024 |url=https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2023/03/it_pays_to_know_your_oil_and_gas.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rmi2024pays, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{It Pays to Know Your Oil and Gas}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2024}, month = sep, url = {https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2023/03/it_pays_to_know_your_oil_and_gas.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }