How Much Would Expanding Federal Oil and Gas Leasing Increase Global Carbon Emissions?

The US government leases a substantial amount of federally owned lands for oil and gas development, accounting for approximately 12 percent of national oil production and 11 percent of national natural gas production in 2023, not counting production in offshore US waters. Yet approaches to the oil and gas federal leasing can vary widely between administrations. For example, under the Trump administration, oil and gas leasing ranged from 1.1 million acres to 2.2 million acres per year, compared to a range of 75,000 to 249,000 acres under the Biden administration (figures corresponding to fiscal years 2017–2020 and 2021–2023, respectively). Actions to expand or restrict the federal land available for lease in a given year can clearly affect fossil fuel production and global greenhouse gas emissions in the long run, but assessments of such effects have been limited due to inherent complexities and substantial uncertainty. Estimating the effects of expanded oil and gas leasing is important to inform broader policy deliberations around energy policy and permitting reform. In this issue brief, I model the global emissions consequences of a sustained expansion of federal leasing at peak levels from the last decade. The goal of this research is to provide a bounding analysis, estimating the uncertainty range for a high leasing case based solely on authorities within the existing scope of the executive branch. This analysis specifically does not estimate the emissions effects of onshore oil and gas provisions in the recently introduced Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 (EPRA). The onshore oil and gas provisions in EPRA are likely to have a more modest effect on emissions than the high leasing scenario analyzed here (see Discussion).This issue brief builds on past research (e.g., Prest et al. 2024; Prest 2022) to estimate the magnitude of emissions increases from a sustained expansion of oil and gas leasing on federal lands. Evaluating the emissions effects of expanded leasing is particularly challenging, as it involves understanding the anticipated effect of lease sales on oil and gas drilling on federal lands; the resulting increase in federal oil and gas production; the amount of production “leakage,” meaning partial substitution of production between federal lands and other sources of supply; and the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the net increase in global oil and gas consumption. The central estimate suggests that perpetually expanded oil and gas leasing on federal lands at annual rates consistent with the fastest pace of leasing over the past decade would increase cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions by 1.2 gigatons (billion metric tons) of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e) over 2024–2050, under a 100-year global warming potential (GWP). For reference, this 1.2 GtCO2e value corresponds to approximately 43 million tons CO2e per year over that 27-year window, or about 0.1 percent of current annual global greenhouse gas emissions. This increase is relative to a business-as-usual (BAU) baseline of about half that amount of leasing. An extensive set of sensitivity analyses suggests that emissions increases are highly unlikely to be outside the 0.6 to 2.1 GtCO2e range. On a territorial emissions accounting basis, US emissions account for approximately 0.2 GtCO2e of the global increase of 1.2 GtCO2e estimated in the central case. This analysis covers onshore development on federal lands and does not consider the potential impacts of expanded offshore development, which accounts for another 14 percent of national US oil production and 2 percent of national gas production.