Technology, Connected - AI Is Digging Up Fossil Fuels

Episode Date: November 9, 2025

Exxon and Chevron are using Microsoft AI to extract more oil. Faster. Cheaper. The goal: every last drop.Holly and Will Alpine (Enabled Emissions) paint a stark picture with Microsoft's own numbers:Exxon deal: 50,000 barrels/day = 6.4 million tonnes CO₂/yearChevron deal: 400,000 barrels/day = 51 million tonnes CO₂/yearMicrosoft's entire FY23 footprint: 17 million tonnes.Carbon removal booked over 15 years: 5 million tonnes.Those two deals alone dwarf both numbers.In Saudi Arabia, Aramco's CEO says AI kept production costs at $3/barrel for two decades. AI makes fossil fuels competitive. It weakens clean energy economics.AI touches every stage of fossil fuel: exploration, drilling, extraction, refining, distribution.We talk about:- How AI cuts production costs 10% while boosting reserves 5%- Why US oil production tripled since 2007 (AI is a major factor)- Projects that took 18 months now take 2 weeks- How aging oil fields stay profitable decades longer- Why Microsoft's "energy principles" are meaningless (they ignore Scope 3)- What guardrails could look like (restrict exploration/extraction, allow safety/methane reduction)Holly and Will left Microsoft to start Enabled Emissions. They're not asking companies to break contracts. They're asking for reasonable guardrails.The lie you're fed: AI will solve climate change.The truth: AI is accelerating fossil fuel extraction.It's ugly. It's real. Learn more.---Guests: Holly & Will Alpine, Founders Enabled Emissions (Former Microsoft)Topics: AI, climate, oil, emissions, Microsoft, Exxon, Chevron, Aramco, enabled emissions--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]

From what I've seen, one of the biggest use cases of AI today is to find and extract more oil and gas, more efficiently and more profitably, which really just undermines all of the good work that we or anyone at the company or even anyone in the clean energy is doing. It's like the sustainability movement is running on a treadmill right now. And there's a malevolent force that is just turning that knob faster, the harder we run. The CEO of Saudi Aramco went on an interview with Bloomberg, and he was stating that AI has been essential for them to maintain their cost of oil production at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and aging reserves. So it has allowed fossil fuels to stay competitive and undermine the economic case for the transition to clean energy. So back in 2019 was when Microsoft released. a press release along with Exxon that very explicitly quantified the barrels per oil per day increased due to Microsoft's technology. They probably regret doing that because we have used it against them,

well, really just not really even against them, but just to quantify what is the scale that we're talking about here. How important is this? So as you mentioned, 81% of each barrel is burned. and burning one barrel of oil releases 43380 kilograms of CO2. That's according to the EPA. That 81% is according to Petroleum Services Company. 50,000 oil equivalent barrels per day. That's 18 million barrels per year. So that's a pretty simple multiplication.

18 million, 43 kilograms, 81% is 6.4 billion kilograms. That's 6.4 million metric tons of CO2 per year. That was for one deal with one company. If we add to that the 400,000 barrels per day for a deal with Chevron, that's 51 million metric tons. So just those two together is over 300% of Microsoft's FY23 emissions. Those are at 17 million metric tons. That includes data centers. So that is showing you the scale.

of the relative scale of these deals compared to Microsoft's entire company emissions for the entire year. And now if you compare that to Microsoft's contracted carbon removal, which are great projects, but that's 5 million metric tons over 15 years, that means these two deals are releasing more carbon equivalent to over 1,000 percent of what Microsoft is contracting, to remove over 15 years. I hope that gives a sense of scale. I want to be clear here that, and maybe we'll get to this, but we have never asked Microsoft to cut ties with these companies to break contracts. We have never, and we'll never ask for that.

We are asking for very reasonable guardrails on how this tech is used. We're not asking for blanket AI bans, anything like that. We just think that, especially as a company who markets them, themselves as a sustainability leader of the world. You cannot be a sustainability leader of the world when you are helping the largest oil companies on the planet dramatically increase emissions that are hundreds to thousands of times the emissions that you as a company are stating are making you a leader. I mean, just like you can't call yourself a company of peace because you have cookies in the office when you're making bombs. If you're a bomb company, providing bombs,

even if you yourself are not setting off those bombs, if you are giving those bombs to others, you cannot call yourself a company apiece. And we think that analogy brings true here as well for sustainability. All right. So what did we just watch right there? We watched Thinking on Paper, bite-sized, a shot of technological tequila to your prefrontal cortex.

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