of carbon emissions needed to meet the 2 degree Celsius target set forth in the last assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013. New research rolled out at an annual scientist meeting finds that the industry will need to recover between 4,000 and 10,000 tons every year of cracked and produced oil and gas fossil reserves in order to do that, according to an analysis done by lead author Dr. Ernesto Monteiro of the University of Alberta in Canada.\nThe eye-watering figure represents the total amount of oil and gas - shale and natural gas produced, extracted and sold - will likely need to be recovered in coming years to meet the carbon mitigation goals. The amount where between 4,000 and 10,000 metric tons of reserves for every 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide they displaced.\nThe benefits of carbon capture increase with the amount being injected," Monteiro wrote in an article accepted to publish in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which DeSmog obtained last week.\nWhile the theoretical ability to limit 2 C warming with fossil fuel carbon budgets is obvious, such action is not taken by the oil and gas industry. Industry groups led by RRC openly seek to capture 38 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually from operating reserves and transfer a portion of that back to the oil industry as revenues. "Comparing natural gas reserves under production with proven oil reserves remaining reveals one potential implication, which is the additional natural gas production that would be required to fully satisfy the 2100 oil supply balance," the paper explained. By Monteiro's estimates, natural gas production will grow by the equivalent of about 4 Gb per year by 2100, while at the same time oil production will decline at about 1 Gb per year, or a total of 2.66 Gb per year in balance. If all the resources at hand could be extracted, of which no amount is available at all times, it would be practical to use all of that fossil fuel along with existing operating wells. But as natural gas production rises, new wells could replace declining oil production with an equivalent number of fossil fuels to reserves.\nCarbon reductions at any level involve "costs" - additional expenditures that necessarily arise from oil and gas extraction and associated energy production, including physical production, liquefaction capability, handling and shipping fees. The research found oil and gas companies bid to recover as much natural gas as possible at all early stages of exploration and production. Natural gas, while more profitable, is much riskier than coal. The paper explains: "Extracting and producing natural gas exploits the time, location and physical composition of the fossil record. Each well represents a different geological formation with different natural gas characteristics. These characteristics mean that the amount of natural gas recovered from a well is not determinative of the productivity of the well from which it is extracted. Reference reserves provide an indication of the natural gas resources that may exist in different shale formations and the potential of these resources based on past and future discoveries."\nThe only kind of geomorphological formation that can be considered very promising for oil and gas production are mesopolar formations, those within one mile from surface to three miles below ground. Mesopolar formations are generally regarded as more inflexible than permafrost or acid shale formations, less stable than other subsurface formations or fractured tight rock, more susceptible to seepage, and more susceptible to oil production costs. For these reasons, the reserve estimate put out at the annual meeting does not consider natural gas production to be an economic viability from existing mesopoint formations.\nThe net result is that the industry will lose out on billions of dollars in revenues to pay part of the cost of carbon sequestering, underground scrubber systems and other forms of carbon capture from any new natural gas reserves of coming years. In order to fuel plants, the primary gas is oxygen; when undertaking oil and gas production and development that oxygen is extracted from the air and converted into methane that is vented through rock. It then is dispersed at the surface using various methods, such as proximity to carbon sequestration facilities and underground scrubber systems, to provide the chance to store carbon dioxide that would otherwise have been leaked back into the atmosphere.\nIn 2014, a team of scientists from the National Academies of Sciences calculated that deferring as many as 3000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted from oil and gas reserves already on Earth to new ones would come at a cost of 5 cents annually to the oil industry per ton. Revenues would then be about  $\$35-60$  billion. "Financials indicate that nonconventional expenditures, including relatively large ones, will have a material net impact on industry and substantial constraints on operating income and free cash flow," the team concluded in a report published in an academic journal prepared for the annual meeting of the National Academies of Sciences. It concluded that the finance companies that actually receive profits from the stranded reserves, which offer little more than  $\$4$