Inge van den Bijgaart

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Gothenburg. At the EEA conference, I will present a paper on fossil exploration and abandonment. In this paper, we establish that continued exploration of fossil resources need not be incompatible with leaving developed reserves unextracted. In fact, a first-best implementation of a carbon budget always involves such abandonment, and thus exploration that pushes developed reserves in excess of the remaining budget. Our quantitative analysis reveals that this abandonment amounts to 9-19% of current oil and gas reserves.