Exxon Would Like You to Invest in Its $100-Billion Carbon Capture Scheme

After spending a long time profiting off oil and gasoline and propagating local weather denial, Exxon simply wants just a little cash, man. In an interview with the AP revealed earlier this week, Joe Blommaert, the president of a division of Exxon referred to as Low Carbon Solutions, laid out the corporate’s plan to remodel an industrial hall in Houston right into a $100 billion hub for carbon seize and storage. The firm would similar to a number of monetary backers to do it, please.

The Houston Ship Channel is considered one of busiest industrial stretches within the U.S. The 50-mile (80-kilometer) hall can be residence Texas’ largest cluster of oil and gasoline refineries; there are 10 of them in the Houston metro area alone, producing 2.6 million barrels of crude oil every day. All these refineries, which embrace Exxon of their ranks, produce a hell of lots of carbon dioxide. The proposal Blommaert sketched out on this interview would seize all that carbon dioxide from the economic amenities and inject it underground—in all probability, the AP reported, miles away beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

Carbon seize and storage (CCS) is one thing that the world might be going to should deploy because it harnesses actually each trick within the ebook to maintain the planet from burning up. However, it’s additionally the oil and gasoline trade’s favourite local weather resolution for plenty of causes—chief amongst them is the implication that, if we might simply determine a method to one way or the other hold the carbon dioxide from getting within the air within the first place, all our issues with fossil fuels might be solved.

The shortcomings with CCS are plentiful in its present state. The know-how has a historical past of high-profile (and costly) failures and does nothing about different pollution like methane. Some oil and gasoline producers additionally envision utilizing all that captured carbon to assist produce much more fossil fuels, which, once more, is the alternative of what we must be doing! It’s clear that this ain’t it.

A bit of logic gained’t cease Exxon from touting the know-how it has determined is a greater wager than renewables. “What is important in my mind is this collaboration of the whole industry, the whole of government, and the whole of society,” Blommaert instructed the AP concerning the proposed challenge. “And it is actually addressing climate change, which technically is a very complicated issue. It needs all of the solutions, and it is not one or the other.”

Despite CCS’s setbacks, it’s nonetheless a darling of wealthy and highly effective technofuturists, and the federal authorities has additionally made a lot of funds available to jumpstart the trade. Exxon, it appears, is keen to get in on a few of this money floating round—regardless that it’s value tons of of billions of {dollars} as an organization. When the AP requested how a lot money Exxon was prepared to pony up for this transformative new imaginative and prescient for Houston, Blommaert declined to “quote a specific number” however assured the AP that “the key is that policy to attract public and private investment in supporting this is put in place. And that’s why we talk about the value of carbon, which is essential.”

Some clues as to how a lot Exxon might spend on this wonderland of CCS got here this week within the firm’s securities filings—the place, for the primary time, the corporate admitted that a few of its property could also be in danger because of local weather change. In these filings, which have been issued beneath the brand new board members put in after a shareholder revolt in May, Exxon mentioned it deliberate to spend $15 billion complete over the subsequent 5 years on initiatives to scale back emissions. That’s some huge cash—greater than every other oil main—but it surely wouldn’t come near protecting Exxon’s Houston CCS dream.

Close to the top of the interview, the reporter requested Blommaert why, if Exxon cares a lot about local weather change, it merely doesn’t cease producing a lot dang oil and gasoline (nice query imho). Blommaert replied that the world “will still require energy sources from fossil fuels” and that CCS “can meet the energy supplies that the world needs in a way that the emissions are being abated, and that you can do that at the lowest cost possible to society.”

Reading this interview is a incredible train in familiarizing your self with Big Oil’s favourite buzzwords. Talking concerning the “value of carbon” is a sneaky tactic meant to create a extra constructive and fewer dire affiliation with carbon dioxide. Blommaert’s response about “modern life” needing “energy” is lifted straight from denier teams just like the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Even Blommaert’s job title is little greater than a buzzword: “low carbon” is mainly a nothing phrase that oil corporations have began utilizing to persuade the general public that they’re doing one thing about this complete local weather change factor when what we actually want is no carbon.

You’d suppose that one of many world’s largest historic emitters might need just a little extra humility when asking for a handout for an unproven know-how, however by no means say by no means.