The oil and gas giant is pushing its carbon capture and sequestration technology to drive the type of speedy emissions reduction the White House is expected to announce this week.
ExxonMobil says it can help turn President Joe Biden’s climate agenda into reality — if Washington will kick in tax breaks and other assistance for a $100 billion carbon-capture project near Houston. By 2030, the project’s initial phase would capture 50 million tons of carbon dioxide every year from the refineries and petrochemical plants that line the Houston Ship Channel — the heart of the city’s oil and gas industry — and store it underground, Chief Executive Darren Woods told POLITICO on Monday. That’s the equivalent of taking nearly 11 million cars off the road. Woods said the massive project offers the only realistic way for the U.S. to get anywhere near the kinds of quick, aggressive cuts to the nation’s greenhouse gas output that Biden is expected to call for this week to avert disastrous changes to the Earth’s climate. Exxon is not asking for direct federal subsidies but is urging the administration to help kickstart the effort, either through tax breaks to create incentives for the technology or by establishing a price on carbon that will help create a market for the company’s new business of capturing the emissions. Exxon is not asking for direct federal subsidies, but it is urging the administration to help kickstart the effort through tax breaks to create incentives for the technology or by establishing a price on carbon that will help drive its newest business to capture the emissions. “There aren’t any bigger opportunities to make this kind of reduction in the time frame we’re talking about,” Woods said in an interview. “Society doesn’t have a lot of needle-moving opportunities to reduce CO2 significantly in the time frame.” But the Biden administration is not considering Exxon’s idea as it prepares to roll out its own climate plans, according to people familiar with White House thinking. Meanwhile, environmental groups and many Democrats have slammed carbon capture proposals as a climate strategy, saying the only way to permanently reduce greenhouse gas pollution is a wholesale switch away from fossil fuels.
