Nature magazine’s new study says Saudi Arabian oilfields are amongst the lowest carbon emitters on the planet, according to the Houston Chronicle . Venezuelan fields took the opposite aplomb, with its facilities’ carbon intensity measured at six times that of Saudi Arabia. This was likely due to PDVSA’s power intensive and widespread “steam flooding” technique used to increase oil flows. Stanford University conducted the study with funding from Saudi Aramco, the KSA’s fossil fuel giant. It focused on the producers that supplied significant amounts of fuel to the Chinese market, which excluded the United States from the study. Though American shipments have reached Asian ports in recent months, the United States did not begin exporting fuel until the end of 2015, which is after the study was commissioned and took full force. “China has been the world’s largest growth market for energy for the past 15 years and accounted […]