Abstract
Parties to the 2015 Paris Agreement pledged to limit global warming to well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C relative to pre-industrial times1. However, fossil fuels continue to dominate the global energy system and a sharp decline in their use must be realized to keep the temperature increase below 1.5 °C (refs. 2,3,4,5,6,7). Here we use a global energy systems model8 to assess the amount of fossil fuels that would need to be left in the ground, regionally and globally, to allow for a 50 per cent probability of limiting warming to 1.5 °C. By 2050, we find that nearly 60 per cent of oil and fossil methane gas, and 90 per cent of coal must remain unextracted to keep within a 1.5 °C carbon budget. This is a large increase in the unextractable estimates for a 2 °C carbon budget9, particularly for oil, for which an additional 25 per cent of reserves must remain unextracted. Furthermore, we estimate that oil and gas production must decline globally by 3 per cent each year until 2050. This implies that most regions must reach peak production now or during the next decade, rendering many operational and planned fossil fuel projects unviable. We probably present an underestimate of the production changes required, because a greater than 50 per cent probability of limiting warming to 1.5 °C requires more carbon to stay in the ground and because of uncertainties around the timely deployment of negative emission technologies at scale.
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Data availability
The results data and key source data in the figures (including in the Supplementary Information) are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5118971. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The underlying code (mathematical equations) for the model is available via GitHub (https://github.com/etsap-TIMES/TIMES_model). The full model database is also available via Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5118971). Given the complexity of the model, further guidance will be provided on model assumptions upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.
Change history
25 January 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04334-0
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Acknowledgements
We thank P. Erickson (SEI), G. Muttitt (IISD) and C. McGlade (IEA) for commenting on a draft version of this paper. This work has been supported by the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and the UK Energy Research Centre Phase 4 (grant numberEP/S029575/1).
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All authors were involved in the design approach to the research. D.W. and J.P. undertook the scenario modelling and analysed the results. All authors contributed to the development of early drafts of the paper, and to writing the final paper.
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Extended data figures and tables
Extended Data Fig. 1 Supply cost curves split by region in TIAM-UCL.
a–c, Curves for oil (a), fossil methane gas (b) and coal (c). Costs are given on an energy-content basis (barrel of oil equivalent for oil, British thermal units for gas and joules for coal), on a US$2005 basis. For oil, different mining processes output different commodities (for example, oil sands mining initially (pre-upgrading) outputs a barrel of bitumen) hence the use of the energy-content cost basis. For gas, associated gas is not included in Extended Data Fig. 1b as it is a by-product of oil production
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Supplementary Information
This file contains supplementary text, supplementary table 1 – 26, supplementary equations, supplementary figures 1 – 17 and supplementary references.
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Welsby, D., Price, J., Pye, S. et al. Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5 °C world. Nature 597, 230–234 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03821-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03821-8
