As Biden climate summit kicks off, Exxon calls for govt support for CCS

London, (Quantum Commodity Intelligence)- ExxonMobil has urged the US government to support plans to create a hub for carbon capture and storage projects in the Houston area, investment that the oil major said could lead to capturing and burying 100 million mt of carbon dioxide a year.

The Texas-based oil and gas producer called for "large-scale collaboration" between the government and private sector to build infrastructure that can transport and store carbon dioxide in the manufacturing hub around the Houston ship canal.

"ExxonMobil believes the United States could establish a CCS Innovation Zone along the Houston Ship Channel and surrounding industrial areas with the potential to effectively capture all the CO2 emissions from the petrochemical, manufacturing and power generation facilities located there," the company said in an announcement.

"The CO2 would be piped into natural geologic formations thousands of feet under the sea floor," it said.

The plan by the world's sixth-biggest oil-producing company comes ahead of a virtual climate summit of world leaders hosted by US President Joe Biden on Thursday.

The new US leader has pledged to make climate change a focus of his administration, signing back up to the Paris Agreement - a global pact to cut emissions of greenhouse gases - after his predecessor President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 accord.

The project Exxon is proposing would bury 100 million mt of carbon dioxide annually by 2040 – an ambition that would require tens of billions of dollars of funding and the scale of which would require government support.

The gas would be buried in geological formations under the sea in the US Gulf Coast.

Scale

The heralding of carbon capture and storage to mitigate carbon dioxide by Exxon – long criticised for funding climate sceptic groups – is reflective of a broader trend within the sector.

Oil majors and miners are funding pilot projects to prove that the concept of capturing and burying emissions can work at scale, which means consistently trapping and burying the gas from installations such as refineries, petrochemical crackers and power stations.

Shell, Total and Norway's state-owned Equinor have partnered on a project to capture emissions onshore in Norway and then ship and inject them 2,500 metres under the sea bed in the northern North Sea.

And last week Glencore, one of the world's biggest miners, partnered with the Australian government and China's Huaneng Group to bury emissions from a coal-fired power plant in eastern Australia.

The International Energy Agency – the energy research arm of the OECD - says carbon capture and storage technology is essential if the world is to reach net-zero emissions and avoid the worst impacts of a warming world.

But some environmentalists decry the technology, saying it is unproven, costlier than other alternatives and will not be able to be deployed at scale early enough to meet commitments made under the Paris treaty.

Oil majors, however, argue they are best placed to deploy the technology, having had decades of experience of using the gas to squeeze out remaining barrels from oil reservoirs through a process called enhanced oil recovery.