ranking who should decarbonize first

Built a model that answers a specific question: across hundreds of energy operators, which ones should spend money cutting emissions first, and is it worth it. Rising carbon prices turn emissions into a financial exposure. This turns that exposure into a ranked list.

the data spine

The pipeline runs in five stages. The first pulls raw Petrinex volumetric, NGL, and infrastructure data. The second cleans it into facility-month production tables with operator mappings. The third computes facility and operator emissions, intensities, and decision metrics. The last two handle the clustering and scenarios, and the interactive outputs.

The 2023 baseline covers 396 Alberta operators across roughly 2,800 facilities and about 780 million barrels of oil equivalent. It maps 98 percent of volumes to an operator. A 2022 to 2023 panel of 798 operator-years tracks what companies actually did.

the emissions model

Each facility aggregates eight emission sources: venting, flaring, fuel combustion, processing, oil and condensate, water handling, steam, and fugitives. Everything normalizes to intensity in kg CO2e per BOE, using explicit conversion factors and a 28x methane equivalence from IPCC AR5. That gives a like-for-like comparison between a SAGD producer and a conventional gas operator.

the decision scores

Three scores drive the ranking. An investment score as an NPV-to-CAPEX ratio. A benefit score weighting intensity, scale, financial return, and regulatory pressure. An opportunity score that combines emissions size, project economics, and regulatory exposure. Carbon prices run from around $65 a tonne in 2023 to roughly $170 by 2030. At that level a 500,000 tonne operator faces about $85 million a year in carbon cost, which is the number that makes a capital committee pay attention.

the finding that matters

The panel revealed something uncomfortable. 80 percent of operators increased absolute emissions even as production grew, and the correlation between a high 2022 opportunity score and realized reductions was about negative 0.73. The operators with the most to gain from decarbonizing were the ones whose emissions grew fastest.

The lesson sits in that number. In a growth environment, production swamps efficiency unless reduction is explicitly constrained. Engagement with large operators has to be framed around intensity and project portfolios, because absolute cuts will not happen on their own while volumes climb.

why it matters

Decarbonization capital gets allocated on stories and pledges. This replaces the story with operator-level economics: who emits, how much it costs to fix, what it returns at a real carbon price, and whether the operator has actually moved before. That is a portfolio you can defend to an investment committee.