9 RWE). I have, in response to several plaintiff attorney’s requests, shared my results on selected oil, gas, and coal companies that are defendants in these cases with respect to emissions attributed to each company for certain periods of years, such as 1988 to 2015. The dataset has been publicly available since 2014 on a third-party website (www.carbonmajors.org), and accessible at no cost to any academic, attorney, analyst, citizen, media outlet, or oil & gas company who wishes to review and/or use the results. Q18: Could you please briefly describe the key findings of “Potential emissions of CO2 and methane from proved reserves of fossil fuels: An alternative analysis,” Global Environmental Change, a paper you co-authored? A18: The world’s largest oil, natural gas, and coal producers possess proven recoverable fossil fuel reserves equal to 1.6 times the amount of carbon that can be emitted to the atmosphere in this century — 275 GtC (billion tonnes carbon) — if we are to restrict global warming to 2ºC. Most of these reserves are owned by twenty-eight state-owned companies studied (210 GtC, or 76% of the “remaining carbon budget,” RCB), whereas forty-two investor-owned companies own relatively small reserves with potential emission totaling 44 GtC (15% of RCB). Thus the global imperative is to limit production of reserves owned by state-owned companies such as Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, and Petroleos de Venezuela, and to curtail the investment in additional reserves by investor-owned companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and BHP Billiton — at least to the extent that they invest only in new carbon reserves that will not be stranded in the event the world gets serious about policies to assure we do not exceed the 2ºC threshold (or, quite possibly, less than 2ºC). The companies have an obligation, and are increasingly subject to resolutions by their shareholders, to fully and transparently assess their reserves, capital investment options (including in renewable energy), and production strategies in light of aggressive policies to limit global emissions or disruptive technologies that displace carbon altogether. Q19: How was your group able to arrive at these findings, or what methods were used? A19: We used the same methodology developed in Heede 2014 to estimate potential emissions from the production of declared quantities of reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal. We only quantified emissions from proved reserves (not additional resources), and gathered reserves data from company publications. We deducted non-energy uses such as road oil, petrochemicals, and lubricants when estimating potential emissions from reserves. Q20: What are the primary differences between the historical research and the future reserves research? A20: Historical research quantifies operational and product-related emissions from each entity’s annual extraction of fossil fuels based on company-reported annual equity production, deducting for non-energy uses, and applying standard emission factors to barrels of crude oil and natural gas liquids (NGL), volumes of natural gas, and tonnes of coal (by rank). Our reserves research, on the other hand, while focused on attributable future emissions, does so in the aggregate and does not model specific scenarios for each company’s annual depletion rates of their reserves or reserve replacements. This is the subject of ongoing work at Climate Accountability Institute.