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

"The oil giant floated the idea for an enormous carbon capture and storage hub this week. It just needs some help footing the pricetag."

"After spending decades profiting off oil and gas and propagating climate denial, Exxon just needs a little money, man. In an interview with the AP published earlier this week, Joe Blommaert, the president of a division of Exxon called Low Carbon Solutions, laid out the company’s plan to transform an industrial corridor in Houston into a $100 billion hub for carbon capture and storage. The company would just like a few financial backers to do it, please.

The Houston Ship Channel is one of busiest industrial stretches in the U.S. The 50-mile (80-kilometer) corridor is also home Texas’ largest cluster of oil and gas refineries; there are 10 of them in the Houston metro area alone, producing 2.6 million barrels of crude oil each day. All those refineries, which include Exxon in their ranks, produce a hell of a lot of carbon dioxide. The proposal Blommaert sketched out in this interview would capture all that carbon dioxide from the industrial facilities and inject it underground—probably, the AP reported, miles away under the Gulf of Mexico.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is something that the world is probably going to have to deploy as it harnesses literally every trick in the book to keep the planet from burning up. However, it’s also the oil and gas industry’s favorite climate solution for a number of reasons—chief among them is the implication that, if we could just figure out a way to somehow keep the carbon dioxide from getting in the air in the first place, all our problems with fossil fuels could be solved."

Molly Taft reports for Earther November 4, 2021.

Source: Earther, 11/05/2021