Deborah Gordon, OCI+ Principal Investigator
Deborah Gordon is the principal investigator of the Oil Climate Index plus Gas (OCI⁺), a first-of-its-kind analytic tool that compares the life-cycle climate impacts of global oil and gas resources. Gordon is a senior principal in the Climate Intelligence Program at RMI where she leads the Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative. Gordon serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and is an affiliate at Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab. Before joining RMI, Gordon was the director of the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She began her career with Chevron and directed the Energy Policy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Gordon has taught at the Yale School of Environmental Studies and Brown University. She is a stakeholder in NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System and has testified before Congress and served on National Academy of Sciences panels. The OCI⁺ is the topic of Gordon’s new book, No Standard Oil (Oxford University Press, 2022).
OCI+ Project Partners
Adam Brandt
Adam Brandt is an Associate Professor in Stanford University’s Department of Energy Resources Engineering. He also leads Stanford’s Natural Gas Initiative (NGI). Brandt’s research has focused on reducing the environmental impacts of energy systems. Specifically, his lab seeks to measure and estimate impacts from technologies at broad scales, and to help reduce these impacts. Applications include reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, and from power systems through optimization of renewable energy integration. He has led much of Stanford’s research to measure and economically detect natural gas leaks at production sites and from pipelines. Methane, the primary component of natural gas. Brandt has been a collaborator on the OCI⁺ project since 2013. He is the principal investigator of the Oil Production Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimator (OPGEE) model, which is used to estimate upstream production greenhouse gas emissions.
Joule Bergerson
Joule Bergerson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Calgary. She is also the Canada Research Chair in Energy Technology Assessment. Joule is the lead researcher on the open-source tool, the Petroleum Refinery Lifecycle Inventory Model (PRELIM), which was released in April 2015, and has been adopted as part of the Oil Climate Index plus Gas (OCI⁺). Her research centers on the use of modern hybrid life-cycle assessment techniques to assess the economy-wide impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, of current and proposed oil sands projects. projects. These techniques will help prioritize research and development activities, by identifying technologies – or optimal combinations of technologies – that would provide particularly large life-cycle benefits. Dr. Bergerson’s primary research interests are systems-level analysis for policy and decision making of energy system investment and management. The focus of her work is developing tools and frameworks for the assessment of prospective technology options and their policy implications from a life-cycle perspective.
Jonathan Koomey
Jonathan Koomey’s research focuses on the economics of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the effects of information technology on resource use. From 2016 to 2018, Koomey was a lecturer in Earth Systems, from 2012 to 2016 he was a research fellow, and from 2004 to 2012 he was a consulting professor, all at Stanford University. For over two decades, he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Yale University, and the University of California Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group. Koomey holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s in history and science from Harvard University. He is the author or co-author of nine books and more than 200 articles and reports, including Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving, and Cold Cash Cool Climate: Science-Based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs (both published by Analytics Press).
RMI Lead Researchers
Contributing Researchers
Numerous other researchers have been involved in this project since its inception. Here is a complete list.