AI’s potential climate benefits outweighed by role in boosting fossil fuels, study finds

AI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a study has found. Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas.

The study is the first to quantify the climate impact of AI across the full power sector. Previous research has explored its indirect climate benefits – such as reducing renewable downtime and optimising electricity grids – while ignoring the extra pollution from increasing productivity.

What Happened

Holly Alpine, a co-author of the study and a former Microsoft employee who left to co-found the Enabled Emissions campaign group, said the research team used a conservative assumption that AI adoption would happen at the same rate for fossil fuels and.

• Across 64 scenarios, they found net yearly carbon pollution rose by 0.47-1.8 gigatonnes, or about 1-5% of the energy sector’s annual emissions.

• The International Energy Agency estimates that AI could boost technically recoverable oil and gas reserves by 5% and cut the cost of deepwater offshore projects by 10%.

• Ketan Joshi, an independent climate analyst who was not involved in the study, said the AI sector was “fundamentally hungry for fossil fuels” and that the impacts went well beyond data centres driving fossil.

Key Details

They cautioned that the results were a “directional and structural finding, not a precise forecast”, though the broad relationship held true across every scenario and sensitivity test they ran.

• The researchers did not factor datacentre energy demand into their calculations but found AI enables productivity gains in the fossil fuel sector that result in emissions at least three times current estimates for datacentres.

• Climate scientists and energy experts have been troubled by the rapid construction of increasingly large and energy-hungry AI datacentres, which are typically powered by burning fossil gas.

• “The returns are already visible in the industry,” its analysts wrote, citing hundreds of millions of dollars in reported AI-related savings from Equinor and Abu Dhabi’s Adnoc.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by The Guardian as more details emerge