The United Nations climate summit (COP28) held in Dubai came to a close last week with the first-ever mention of “fossil fuels” in a decision text.

It recognizes that “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner” is necessary to achieve net-zero by 2050. This is important considering fossil fuels are responsible for around 90% of global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions (land-use change like deforestation contributes the rest).

The decision was recognized as part of negotiations under the Global Stocktake (GST), a five-yearly assessment of progress under the Paris Agreement to chart the future course of climate action.

Another first, however, is the fact that a COP decision also explicitly carves out a role for one fossil fuel in that transition: gas. The GST decision states: “transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.” For decades, fossil fuel companies and governments in the developed world have used the terms 'transition fuel’ and ‘bridge fuel’ to highlight the role fossil gas could play in a transition away from fossil fuels, especially with respect to ‘energy security’. It’s a handy PR trick: these terms have increasingly been used by policymakers and in media discussions, but the average onlooker wouldn’t necessarily pick up on their significance, or how much this one phrase detracts from the decision to transition away from fossil fuels.

It also conflicts directly with another key COP28 decision: the need to reduce methane emissions by 2030.

“Taken at face value, substituting fossil gas for coal can reduce CO₂ emissions for the same amount of energy generated, but this doesn’t take into account the fact that methane leaks are ubiquitous and higher emissions of methane will contribute to global warming,” said Dr. David Ho, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii. Over a 100-year time period, one tonne of methane can trap 28 times as much heat as a tonne of CO₂.

Alongside methane, “CO₂ emissions from fossil gas are still significant,” Dr. Ho added. At present, fossil gas contributes about 20% of total CO₂ emissions. Coal contributes about 33% and oil 29%. So while coal has higher emissions intensity, meaning it emits more CO₂ per unit of energy generated, the combustion of oil and gas too can entail comparable CO₂ emissions. Currently, the U.S. emits more tonnes of CO₂ from oil in a year than India does from coal.

Oil and gas off the hook

Coal dependency is a dominant feature of energy systems in the developing world today, while developed countries are far more reliant on oil and gas. In countries like India, Indonesia, South Africa and Vietnam, coal constitutes an overwhelming proportion of both electricity and primary energy supply. Coal is also a domestically available resource in these countries.

A study published in Nature earlier this year found that a focus on coal phase-out places an inequitable burden on poorer countries. It also showed that a more sociopolitically feasible trajectory would entail quicker phase-out of oil and gas in the developed world.

Nevertheless, the COP decision text on GST only explicitly mentions one fossil fuel in the context of a phase-down: coal. It states countries must accelerate efforts “towards the phase-down of unabated coal power.” On the other hand, it throws in a lifeline for fossil gas as a “transitional fuel.”

At the COP28 closing plenary, Colombia’s minister for environment and sustainable development Susana Muhamad said “the loopholes [in the final decision] have risks which can undermine political will. Transition fuels will end up colonizing the space for decarbonisation.” Antigua and Barbuda echoed similar concerns terming the paragraph on transitional fuels a “dangerous loophole” because “LNG and natural gas are [still] fossil fuels.” Surely enough, reactions by energy ministers and the oil and gas industry soon after the conference attested to such concerns.

Speaking to the BBC, U.K.’s climate minister Graham Stuart said new oil and gas projects are “green” and "absolutely a transition away from fossil fuels”. Australia’s energy and climate minister Chris Bowen said “Gas does have a role to play… that’s reflected in our domestic position, that’s reflected in the global decision as well.” And Norway’s petroleum and energy minister Terje Aasland interpreted the COP28 decision to transition away from fossil fuels as not having any impact on Norway’s domestic oil and gas production. COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber too said "The world continues to need low-carbon oil and gas and low-cost oil and gas,” less than 48 hours after the conference ended.

Elaborating on how the language around “transitional fuels” could play out in the U.K., Dr. Doug Parr, Policy Director at Greenpeace U.K. said “For the U.K., gas is not transitional as that shift has largely already happened – coal plays almost no part in power generation, and oil heating accounts for about 6% of homes. However, we have seen strong pushback from the gas industry against even the most obvious carbon-cutting measures.” For example, the gas industry has been arguing that hydrogen — largely derived from fossil fuel sources — should be used to heat homes instead of electrical heat pumps. “We can expect these battles over the role of gas to continue, including whether the UK should or should not extract more fossil gas from the North Sea. To be clear, it should not,” Dr. Parr added.

Meanwhile, the carbon price in the EU’s emissions trading system fell to €66 per tonne — the lowest level since October 2022, compared to €71 before the climate talks started. Some analysts attributed the drop to “weak language” in the Dubai deal.

Other industry news reflected similar sentiments. Oil and gas companies responded positively to the recognition of fossil gas as a transition fuel and the role that carbon capture and storage will play in so-called “abatement”. The COP28 text underscores the need to accelerate “abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilization and storage.” Scientists have cautioned against placing reliance on carbon removal and carbon capture and storage given limitations in scaling the technology, and the fact that, to date, the vast majority of carbon capture projects have been deployed not for the purpose of abating emissions, but to develop more oil. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, globally more than 70 percent of currently deployed carbon capture technology is used for enhanced oil recovery, a process by which compressed carbon is injected into the ground to extract more oil.

The General Secretary of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) too released a statement saying “oil and gas industry will play a constructive and critical role in sustainable development … through enhancing efficiencies and developing and deploying advanced technologies, such as carbon capture utilization and storage.” OPEC member countries produce about 40% of the world’s oil and are estimated to hold about 80% of the world’s oil reserves.

Saudi Arabia, the leading oil producer among OPEC countries, pushed for the inclusion of carbon capture and storage technologies during negotiations, observers at COP28 told this reporter. It did so by referencing the IPCC AR6 report on mitigation which relies on CCS to meet temperature goals. Unsurprisingly, it was also Saudi Arabia that sought a “positive framing” of carbon capture and storage technologies as an important element in achieving net-zero emissions in the summary for policymakers (SPM) for the AR6 mitigation report. It turned out to be quite useful for them to have that report to point to when arguing for the inclusion of carbon capture in COP28 commitments.

It’s worth noting, though, that the SPM itself cautions that implementation of carbon capture and storage currently faces “technological, economic, institutional, ecological-environmental and socio-cultural barriers. Currently, global rates of carbon capture and storage deployment are far below those in modeled pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C.”

A call for developed countries to take the lead

The COP28 decision recognizes that limiting warming to 1.5 °C would require “deep, rapid and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of 43 per cent by 2030 and 60 per cent by 2035 relative to the 2019 level and reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.” But it fails to acknowledge equity-related concerns that developed countries are better placed to undertake rapid and drastic action, as compared to developing ones.

An earlier GST draft text called on developed countries to “take the lead on mitigation actions” given that “the world’s carbon space is not equitably distributed… with developed countries emitting historically more emissions relative to their share of the global population.” But this was dropped during negotiations and the final text does not call for differentiated timelines for developed and developing countries to transition away from fossil fuels.

“Historical responsibility has to be a mainstay of a just climate agreement,” Dr. Parr said. “As such, the failure of the biggest historical emitters to rise to the challenge of fossil fuel phaseout, and their failure to provide climate finance at a scale remotely close to the needs of the most vulnerable countries, means they are perpetuating injustice on a major scale.”

At the closing plenary, developing countries like Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela stressed the need for developed countries to take the lead in mitigation action and provide finance and technological support for developing countries to do so as well.

Tamanna Sengupta, program officer, climate change at Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, said “the lack of strong wording on differentiated pathways coupled with loopholes presented by the inclusion of ‘transitional fuels’ can allow oil and gas-dependent countries to continue production.”