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A new fossil fuel site approved for development off Western Australia’s coast is estimated to contribute 876 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the course of its lifetime, according to new research led by The Australian National University (ANU) in collaboration with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st century.
The level of emissions from the Scarborough project – with liquified natural gas production from the site expected to start in 2026 and continue for at least the next 31 years – will cause, on average, 0.00039 degrees Celsius of additional global warming.
The findings reinforce how each new investment in coal and gas extraction causes long-term environmental and social harm. The research provides a framework for scientists to quantify the consequences of additional greenhouse gas emissions from each new individual fossil fuel project.
The researchers argue that although this level of additional warming may seem small on paper, it would have major consequences for Australia and the world.
According to the research findings, published in the Nature journal Climate Action, an increase of 0.00039 degrees Celsius in additional global warming would:
- Expose an additional 516,000 people around the world to unprecedented heat.
- Leave an additional 356,000 people globally outside the human climate niche (this is defined as the climate conditions in which human societies have historically thrived and is defined by the distribution of the human population with respect to mean annual temperature).
- Cause an additional 484 heat-related deaths in Europe and 118 additional lives lost in Europe by the end of this century under a middle-of-the-road emissions pathway.
- Cause additional thermal exposure in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) that would result in an additional 16 million coral colonies lost in every future GBR bleaching event, which would occur with more frequency due to global warming as a consequence of emissions from the Scarborough project.
“The majority of Australia’s new fossil fuel projects describe their anticipated greenhouse gas outputs as ‘negligible’ in the context of global emissions and claim they’re unable to measure contributions to global warming, while also ignoring expected impacts,” study co-author Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, from ANU, said.
“The site’s developers claim it is not possible to link greenhouse gas emissions from Scarborough with climate change or any particular climate-related impact given that the estimated emissions associated with Scarborough are negligible in the context of existing and future predicted global greenhouse gas concentrations.
“But our research shows emissions output from this new project is far from negligible.”
The researchers calculated that by 2049, the anticipated Australian emissions from the Scarborough project alone will comprise almost half (49 per cent) of Australia’s entire annual CO2 emissions budget.
Co-author Dr Nicola Maher, also from ANU, said that beyond 2050 all emissions from the Scarborough project would require durable CO2 removal from the atmosphere if Australia is to meet its emissions reduction targets.
“That would require a huge increase in the effectiveness and scale of carbon capture and storage technology. For example, in 2023, human activities to move carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into storage amounted to only 0.04 million tonnes of carbon dioxide globally, which is equivalent to just 0.6 per cent of the planned annual Australian emissions from the Scarborough project,” Dr Maher said.
Dr Maher said the research provides a science-based foundation that can be employed by companies and governments in quantifying the consequences of fossil fuel production and use, and in assessing whether projects fall within acceptable levels of environmental and societal risk.
Associate Professor Andrew King, from the University of Melbourne, said: “These findings contrast sharply with claims that individual fossil fuel projects will have negligible impacts. In this case study alone, it is shown that the additional warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions from the Scarborough project will persist for multiple decades to centuries and cause long-term environmental and social impacts.”
The researchers employed a robust methodology known as the Transient Climate Response to CO2 Emissions (TCRE) to calculate the contribution of these emissions to global warming. The TCRE is a major tool of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and works using a combination of our scientific understanding of the earth system, direct observations, and climate model simulations.
