Compatibility of Fossil Fuel Company Strategies With the Paris Agreement

The indicator tracks the gap between the projected production of oil and gas companies based on their actual activities, and production trajectories consistent with the Paris target of 1.5°C of heating. The indicator is expressed as a percentage of the projected production of each company is above or below a pathway consistent with the Paris targets. The indicator analyses both international, publicly traded oil companies and national oil companies, which in many cases have larger production volumes than IOCs but are subject to less public or shareholder scrutiny.

Even if oil and gas firms follow the Paris-compliant pathways outlined here, there is still a substantial chance that temperature targets will be exceeded. Oil and gas firms are assumed here to have constant market shares. This assumption is typical for this sort of analysis but can be expected to introduce errors for at least some firms. These uncertainties are likely to increase over time, meaning projections in the long-term are less certain than in the shorter-term.