DIFFERENT LENS
Who dug up the carbon?
A different question from the rest of this site. The league table elsewhere asks "what is this entity emitting now?" This page asks "how much CO₂ went into the atmosphere when the fuels this entity extracted were burned?"
Both lenses are valid. They just answer different questions. State-owned producers (national oil companies) often dominate the top of any production-attribution list because they account for most of the world’s hydrocarbons by volume. This is not an accusation — producing fossil fuels under existing rules is legal everywhere it appears here.
Top 25 cumulative producers
1965–2018 (cumulative) · GtCO₂ equivalent (Scope 1 + 3 from product use)
| # | Producer | Country | Type | Fuel | Cumulative GtCO₂e | Share of total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Saudi Aramco | SAU | State-owned | Oil & gas | 59.3 | 11.5% |
| 2 | Chevron | USA | Investor-owned | Oil & gas | 43.3 | 8.4% |
| 3 | Gazprom | Russia | State-owned | Natural gas | 43.2 | 8.4% |
| 4 | ExxonMobil | USA | Investor-owned | Oil & gas | 41.9 | 8.2% |
| 5 | National Iranian Oil Company | Iran | State-owned | Oil & gas | 35.7 | 6.9% |
| 6 | BP | UK | Investor-owned | Oil & gas | 34.0 | 6.6% |
| 7 | Royal Dutch Shell | UK | Investor-owned | Oil & gas | 31.9 | 6.2% |
| 8 | Coal India | IND | State-owned | Coal | 23.1 | 4.5% |
| 9 | Pemex | MEX | State-owned | Oil & gas | 22.6 | 4.4% |
| 10 | PetroChina (CNPC) | CHN | State-owned | Oil & gas | 15.6 | 3.0% |
| 11 | Peabody Energy | USA | Investor-owned | Coal | 15.4 | 3.0% |
| 12 | ConocoPhillips | USA | Investor-owned | Oil & gas | 15.2 | 3.0% |
| 13 | Abu Dhabi National Oil Company | UAE | State-owned | Oil & gas | 13.8 | 2.7% |
| 14 | Kuwait Petroleum Corp | KWT | State-owned | Oil & gas | 13.4 | 2.6% |
| 15 | Iraq National Oil Company | IRQ | State-owned | Oil & gas | 13.3 | 2.6% |
| 16 | TotalEnergies | FRA | Investor-owned | Oil & gas | 13.2 | 2.6% |
| 17 | Sonatrach | DZA | State-owned | Oil & gas | 12.0 | 2.3% |
| 18 | Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) | Venezuela | State-owned | Oil & gas | 11.6 | 2.3% |
| 19 | Rosneft | Russia | State-owned | Oil & gas | 11.0 | 2.1% |
| 20 | Petrobras | BRA | State-owned | Oil & gas | 8.7 | 1.7% |
| 21 | Equinor (Statoil) | NOR | State-owned | Oil & gas | 7.8 | 1.5% |
| 22 | RWE | DEU | Investor-owned | Coal | 7.3 | 1.4% |
| 23 | Glencore | Switzerland | Investor-owned | Coal | 7.1 | 1.4% |
| 24 | QatarEnergy | QAT | State-owned | Oil & gas | 7.0 | 1.4% |
| 25 | Nigerian National Petroleum Corp | NGA | State-owned | Oil & gas | 6.5 | 1.3% |
Where this comes from
Heede 2014 + Carbon Majors · Source dataset CC BY-NC — figures below are widely-cited summary points only; full historical dataset is at carbonmajors.org.
Disclaimer. These are PRODUCTION-LINKED cumulative emissions: the gases released when the fuels each producer extracted were burned anywhere in the world. Production attribution is a different methodology from operator-attributed annual emissions shown elsewhere on this site. Both lenses are valid — they answer different questions.