AI-Enabled Emissions Could Outpace Data-Center Impacts, New Study Finds

AI tools are increasingly marketed to the oil and gas sector as productivity boosters. In 2019 Microsoft and ExxonMobil announced a partnership that promised to raise Exxon’s output by up to 50,000 barrels per day using AI. Former Microsoft senior manager Holly Alpine and her husband Will Alpine left the company in 2024 to draw attention to “enabled emissions” – the greenhouse-gas output that AI makes possible when it is used to expand fossil-fuel production. They founded the Enabled Emissions campaign and, with independent researcher Nathan Geldner and Purdue assistant professor Maksym Chepeliev, built a model to quantify this effect.

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The model examined 64 scenarios that varied AI-driven productivity gains for fossil-fuel extraction, renewable generation, and other energy-system components. Results indicate that AI-assisted fossil-fuel production could generate 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than the electricity used to run AI data centers. At the low end, the additional emissions equal the annual output of Mexico; at the high end, they match the emissions of Russia, the world’s fourth-largest emitter. Global emissions rose in every scenario where AI helped both fossil-fuel and renewable sectors equally. Only when AI assistance to fossil fuels was eliminated entirely did any scenario show a net emissions decline.

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• The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) released a revised voluntary corporate standard in June, taking effect next year, that for the first time requires participating companies to disclose emissions-intensive activities in their value chains, explicitly including data, software and other technology services that support fossil-fuel production.

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• The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is drafting a reporting framework that could capture the emissions consequences of corporate actions and investments, including AI-enabled activities.

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• U.S. Senator Ed Markey introduced a 2024 bill that briefly references AI used to advance “high-carbon activities.” The bill did not become law, and most governmental climate-policy efforts continue to focus on data-center electricity use rather than enabled emissions.

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• “There are teams of engineers and salespeople at these tech companies that are explicitly for the fossil fuel industry,” — Holly Alpine, a former senior manager at Microsoft

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• “It is difficult and frustrating for us to see the conversation around ‘the true climate impacts of AI’ just stop at operational emissions,” — Even Holly

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• “We are not categorically anti-AI, and we do not think that AI is fundamentally fossil-based or fundamentally pushing us toward a climate-negative future,” — Even Holly

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The forthcoming SBTi standard will obligate signatories to account for AI-enabled emissions in their climate targets, though participation remains voluntary. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s proposed reporting rules are still under development, and no binding legislation currently requires tech firms to disclose the downstream emissions of AI tools. Advocates argue that without such disclosures, the climate impact of AI will remain dominated by the larger “enabled emissions” pathway identified in the study.

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