Emissions linked to Woodside’s Scarborough gas project could lead to at least 480 deaths, research suggests | Woodside

Greenhouse gas emissions linked to a gas field being developed by Australian fossil fuel company Woodside could lead to the deaths of at least 480 people and expose more than half a million people to unprecedented heat, new research suggests.

Scientists from six universities have examined the climate impact of the $16.5 billion Scarborough project, which is due to start production off Australia’s northwest coast next year and could result in 876 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere over three decades.

Emissions from the project would contribute 0.00039C to global warming, they estimate. Using recently developed techniques known as climate attribution, they suggest that a fraction of the warming would expose an additional 516,000 people worldwide to unprecedented heat and result in the loss of an additional 16 million coral colonies in the Great Barrier Reef with each future bleaching event.

It would also push 356,000 people out of the “human climatic niche” – the reasonable zone for human survival, with an upper limit of average annual temperature of 29°C.

The study, published in the journal Climate Action, is part of a new focus in climate science that aims to quantify the impacts of individual fossil fuel projects and emitters.

A Woodside spokesperson said the company would reduce “direct greenhouse gas emissions from the Scarborough project to the lowest level reasonably possible by integrating energy efficiency measures into design and operation”.

“Climate change is caused by the net global concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” they added. “This cannot be attributed to any particular event, country, industry or activity. »

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But study co-author Andrew King, associate professor of climate science at the University of Melbourne, said the research illustrated that individual projects had tangible climate impacts.

“Often the argument made in favor of individual projects that would result in greenhouse gas emissions is that they are quite small. [in the global context]”, he said. “But in reality, especially in the case of large fossil fuel projects, we can very clearly say that the impacts are not negligible.”

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, co-author of the study and professor of climate science at the Australian National University, said that given Australia’s emissions reduction requirements, Scarborough would also account for a greater proportion of the country’s CO2 emissions budget in coming decades.

“By 2049, assuming the Scarborough project emits the same amount year after year, it’s going to eat up half of our emissions budget,” Perkins-Kirkpatrick said. “That’s what we burn here, not to mention what we export overseas.”

Beyond 2050, Scarborough’s emissions would require removing CO2 from the atmosphere – “technologies that don’t exist yet or that we can’t develop at scale,” she said.

In an intermediate emissions scenario, warming from Scarborough would lead to 484 additional heat-related deaths in Europe alone by the end of the century, the researchers calculated. Taking into account a reduction in cold-related deaths in Europe, they estimate a net contribution of 118 additional deaths.

The researchers calculated the project’s climate impacts using a tool used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called Transient Climate Response to CO2 Emissions (TCRE). The TCRE estimates that every 1,000 gigatons of CO2 emissions results in an additional 0.45°C of global warming.

Scarborough’s contribution to global warming was likely between 0.00024C and 0.00055C, the study authors estimated, but they noted that “direct measurement of global average temperature changes is not possible with this level of precision.”

This approach could be used by governments and companies to assess whether future “projects fall within acceptable levels of environmental and societal risk,” the researchers suggest. The tool “could be part of the process of determining whether a project should be approved,” King said.

Yuming Guo, professor of global environmental health and biostatistics at Monash University, who was not involved in the study, said the study was “a valuable tool for conducting environmental risk assessments”.

“Given the large number of fossil fuel projects underway around the world, the cumulative contribution of these emissions to climate change is substantial and should not be overlooked,” he said.

Dr Kat O’Mara, senior lecturer in environmental management and sustainability at Edith Cowan University, who was not part of the study, said: “Along with the advisory opinion issued a few months ago by the International Court of Justice that countries must take action to protect the climate, this new research reinforces the need to consider climate impacts beyond just the amount of carbon produced. »