THE CARBON WAR

I am here in learning mode 69
The discussion with Accenture’s finest goes on for hours, as the fine wine
flows. Many of the brilliant young minds there may not be advising renewables
companies, but they clearly wish they were.
I have one more glass of wine than I normally would. I am quietly celebrating.
Caroline Lucas has been cleared of her anti-fracking protest charges.
A judge has decided that by sitting down in an unused road outside the gates of
a shut down drilling site, registering a peaceful protest, she was acting within
the law.
City of London, 8 th May 2014
The launch of Carbon Tracker’s oil report. Anthony Hobley’s old employer has
made available its lecture theatre, and it is packed with fund managers, analysts,
and financial journalists.
Christiana Figueres has come to support us again by opening the event.
The executive secretary of the climate talks was in London yesterday to give a
talk on climate change in St Paul’s Cathedral. The latest constituency she is targeting
in her effort to build support for a meaningful Paris treaty is the churches.
Carbon Tracker has has set the tone of public discourse with its unburnable
carbon analysis, she says. Please listen very hard to what they have to
say today.
Today the Carbon Tracker team member taking centre stage is Mark
Fulton. For months now the former head of research at Citi and James Leaton
have been locked in work with their small teams on an analysis of an industry
database for all oil projects around the world. We have had to pay a small
fortune for access to it. Philanthropic foundations would normally run a mile
at the prospect of their money being used in this way. Not on this occasion.
Compiled by a Norwegian data company, Rystad, the database is used by the
International Energy Agency, among others. This will be the first time it has
been looked at through the type of lens that we bring to bear.
The database spans all oil reserves, and resources targeted in exploration
programmes. (Reserves are oil deposits that have been mapped out, are technically
recoverable, and hold the potential to be produced economically. Resources
are oil deposits yet to be mapped out and be tested for economic viability). The
Carbon Tracker study will look at all this oil in terms of current understanding
of the cost at which it can be produced and the price it would have to be sold
at to make an acceptable profit. It will slice up the data project by project, so