Estimating 70 Years of Lifecycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Oil and Gas Drilling in Federal Waters

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the United States agency responsible for leasing federal waters to the oil and gas industry, has built a model to project the combined production and downstream greenhouse gas emissions for oil and gas. Every five years BOEM must propose a program of leases for the outer continental shelf for oil and gas development. As part of this action, BOEM must analyze the environmental consequences of leasing federal waters to the oil and gas industry. One of the major environmental impacts are the greenhouse gas emissions from the production, processing and consumption of oil and gas. Although BOEM has broadly addressed contributions to climate change in past five year programs, for the currently proposed program, BOEM has decided to estimate the emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. By relying on historical consumption patterns, emissions factors, and internal economic and production emissions estimates, BOEM has developed a model to estimate future emissions. Six emissions inventories were developed, the 2012 - 2017 Program, the proposed 2017 - 2022 Program, and all oil and gas resources on already leased federal waters. These three timescales were estimate with high and low energy prices. The 2017 - 2022 inventory has a companion inventory assuming no production is permitted and alternative domestic and international sources of energy must be substituted.   BOEM has increased the ability for decision makers to understand how the emissions of the next five years worth of leasing and 70 years worth of production and consumption will contribute to domestic and global greenhouse gas emissions. These inventories are expected to support future decisions at the national, and possibly regional and local levels.