Energy Bar: Cleaning Up an Oily Mess

Megan Biven took a job in environmental studies with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the agency charged with managing our offshore energy resources, because she wanted to learn about coastal erosion in her home state of Louisiana. 

“If you wanted to work in coastal restoration,” Biven says, “I felt that you had to understand the oil and gas industry.”

She swiftly got some serious on-the-job training, as she started work the same week as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, which led to the largest marine oil spill in history, sending about five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. 

So it’s not surprising that she eventually pivoted to advocacy, founding True Transition, a nonprofit that fights for energy industry workers and the environment. Biven does not oppose oil and gas production, but she does argue for better oversight of oil production. 

She’s just one of the people working to minimize the damage that oil production causes. These efforts are still critical, because despite our increasingly impressive transition to renewable fuels, we won’t be saying goodbye to crude anytime soon. The world consumes almost 100 million barrels of oil every day, and according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 2024 long-term energy forecast, we will use about that amount for at least the next 25 years. 

“It’s the ugly truth here that there’s very little that we can do to get to zero right away,” says Dr. Paasha Mahdavi, professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara, about oil use. “If we are stuck with this, and we are, we should be using the least carbon-intense crude that we can.”

Finding Cleaner Oil

All oil isn’t created equal, and Dr. Mahdavi is one of a number of researchers working on the topic of “low-carbon oil.” He often collaborates with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), which researches both the chemical composition of crude oil and the amount of energy expended to get it out of the ground, refine it, and transport it to determine its Oil Climate Index. The dirtiest oil can be five or six times as carbon-intense as the cleanest, and the filthiest crude emits almost half of its CO2 before it’s even burned.

California, for example, produces fairly dirty crude, Dr. Mahdavi says. “As a geological fact — given that we have produced oil for so long — we are squeezing the last bits of the lemon [in California], and it takes a lot of energy to do that,” he explains. “And that creates emissions.” 

The U.S. has “cleaner” fields in Texas, Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico, where the carbon intensity of the oil is about one-third that of the dirtiest California oil.

RMI and other organizations are working to generate data that will allow governments, firms, and consumers to make the shift to lower-carbon oil. Though these efforts are still in their infancy, even some oil companies are embracing them.

Problematic Production

Lessening the damage from oil production also means steering it away from populated areas and sensitive habitats and establishing and enforcing environmental regulations. That’s where Biven and True Transition comes in.

The Gulf of Mexico, where the vast majority of America’s offshore oil is produced, “is known as the wild west in the international world, because they are allowed to get away with a lot more than they should,” she says, noting that health and environmental regulations routinely go unenforced. 

And it’s “still 100% better than the Permian,” America’s largest onshore oil field in Texas and New Mexico, which is regulated by state agencies that she says are “completely toothless.” 

The U.S. has well over a million oil wells, and those no longer in use need to be closed properly. Otherwise, they can leak oil, methane, and a host of other poisons into our air and water. Biven sees these orphan and abandoned wells as both an environmental threat and an opportunity to help thousands of former oil production workers who could be employed to solve the problem. “Those workers and the skills that they have are actually still very much in need,” she says. 

And workers in the oil industry want their environment protected. “Most of the people who engage in oil field work are those who would be the first to say, ‘We need to protect this place, right?’ Because on the weekends, they're the ones fishing, they're the ones hunting.

“True Transition is trying to be another type of voice, and another type of organization, because it’s hard to find something that isn’t explicitly pro-industry, or explicitly just anti-everything,” Biven says. “We just felt like there needed to be another voice at the table, putting forth solutions, not just problems.”

Using Less

That IEA forecast that shows little to no drop in oil and gas demand comes from the agency’s “Stated Policies Scenario,” which is based on current environmental policies and economic trends. 

But the agency also has an “Announced Pledges Scenario” that explores what the “full and timely implementation of national energy and climate goals … would mean for the energy sector.” In this alternate future, global oil demand is cut almost in half, which would likely mean the dirtier oil in places like California wouldn’t be worth the squeeze. 

And in the IEA’s “Net Zero” scenario, oil demand drops about 75% by 2050, almost certainly ending production for all but the cleanest, most efficient producers, likely in the Persian Gulf.

One big way to cut demand for oil is to encourage people to switch to electric vehicles, public transit, or bikes, as roughly two-thirds of the oil produced is used in transportation, mostly gasoline for cars. Experts debate the best way to do that. Some research shows that higher gas prices would speed the adoption of EVs. Oil companies might be compelled to raise the price of gas if the government required them to clean up after themselves and pay for the air pollution and climate change wrought by their products. 

To this point, the fossil fuel industry hasn’t been held to account, though there are lawsuits trying to change that. All that adds up to a massive subsidy for an industry that already enjoys generous government subsidies, keeping oil unnaturally cheap. 

“We have subsidized oil platforms, we have subsidized oil drilling for decades,” says Dr. Ranjit Deshmukh, a UCSB professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. “All that is baked into the [low] price of oil.”

Building a Better Energy Future Together

Though she supports strict environmental regulation for oil production, Biven doesn’t think higher oil prices are an effective environmental tactic. “I’m a weird environmentalist where I think if things hurt for the regular person, it’s gonna make them not care about these things as much,” she says. “We have to be cautious about the steps that we take until we can ramp up the substitutes.”

In founding True Transition, Biven recognized that an all-or-nothing environmentalism that discounts the daily needs of the average worker is a losing political strategy. Instead, she wants to empower workers and the government to build a brighter energy future together. 

“One of the biggest fights that we have right now,” she says, “is restoring faith in government and restoring the competency and mission of government to do big things.”

And to do big things, we need workers like the thousands of oil workers who have been idled in the last 20 years, Biven says, adding that the smartest way to fight for a cleaner oil industry, and a cleaner energy future, is by being inclusive. Part of her motivation for founding True Transition was “the extent to which mainstream environmentalists just discount these jobs and these people as if they're nothing. It was quite crazy to me.”

Five Takeaways

• Even with new energy technology, global oil use is unlikely to decline significantly in the coming years.
• Oil production has environmental impacts, and in the United States, regulators do not do as much as other countries to avoid this pollution.
• Not all oil is created equal; some places and companies produce oil with less environmental impact.
• Groups like RMI and True Transition fight for a cleaner oil industry.
• Oil workers could be an important ally in the effort to clean up the oil industry.

What You Can Do

The first step is to minimize your own use of oil, most of which is used in transportation. So buy an EV, ride a bike/e-bike, or take public transit. You can also support groups like RMI and True Transition that recognize that we need to clean up the oil industry, because the world will continue to use oil for the foreseeable future.