The carbon underground 2016: managing the climate risks of fossil fuel companies in investment portfolios
This report presents an analysis of the latest rankings of The Carbon Underground 200TM (CU200), FFI’s list of the top publicly-traded coal, oil, and gas reserve owners ranked by the potential carbon emissions content of their reported reserves. The 2016 CU200 list was created using data available as of May 31, 2016. The reserves of these companies total 474 gigatons (Gt) of potential CO2 emissions. Since the release of our last report in February of 2015, 49 new companies – 35 coal companies and 14 oil companies -- were added to the CU200 list. The potential emissions owned by companies on the list declined by almost 15% from last year, but are still more than 460% of the carbon budget to 2050 allocated to the CU200. The decline in emissions and the company turnover on the list are largely the result of conditions facing coal companies: coal mine suspensions and closures, along with an extensive round of due diligence assessing the reasonableness of reported coal reserves. Despite the much-publicized decline of Western coal companies, we expect that future global coal demand (and emissions) will be heavily dependent on usage trends in China and India. While the oil and gas industry also faced significant headwinds from depressed commodity prices, potential emissions from The Carbon Underground Oil and Gas 100 declined only slightly.