ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods on Saturday rejected the Worldwide Power Company‘s latest declare that utilizing wide-scale carbon seize to combat local weather change was an implausible “phantasm”, saying the identical may very well be stated about electrical automobiles and photo voltaic power.
“There is no such thing as a answer set on the market right now that’s on the scale to unravel the issue,” Woods informed Reuters on the sidelines of the COP28 local weather summit in Dubai.
“So, you could possibly say that about carbon seize right now, you could possibly say that about electrical automobiles, about wind, about photo voltaic. I feel that criticism is reputable for something that we’re making an attempt to do, to begin with,” he stated.
Whereas few commercially viable carbon-capture tasks exist attributable to excessive prices, EVs now make up about 13% of the worldwide new automobile market, and photo voltaic and wind deployments have been increasing quickly.
Woods’ look marked the primary time a CEO of fossil gasoline large Exxon has attended one of many annual U.N.-sponsored local weather summits, and mirrored a rising effort amongst oil and fuel corporations worldwide to recast themselves as a part of the answer to international warming, versus a trigger.
The long run function of carbon seize expertise and fossil fuels is a key situation on the convention.
The IEA, the West’s power watchdog, issued a report on November 27 simply forward of the COP28 gathering that stated the fossil gasoline trade was going through a “second of fact” the place producers had to decide on between deepening the local weather disaster, or shifting to scrub power.
It slammed oil and fuel corporations that argue drilling can proceed indefinitely so long as the emissions from combusting them are cleaned up, saying the trade was sustaining an “phantasm that implausibly giant quantities of carbon seize are the answer.”
Exxon has introduced $17 billion of funding in its low carbon enterprise, which incorporates carbon seize, and has argued that greenhouse fuel emissions are the issue inflicting local weather change, not the fossil fuels themselves.
He stated he believed oil and fuel would play an “vital function” on this planet by means of 2050, however declined to offer an estimate for demand ranges.
As a part of Exxon’s low carbon technique, it introduced in July a $4.9 billion acquisition of Denbury and its 1,300-mile (2,100-kilometer) carbon dioxide pipeline community, which shall be linked to offshore blocks within the Gulf of Mexico the place Exxon plans to bury carbon.
Exxon has thus far satisfied the biggest ammonia maker in america, an industrial fuel firm and a big metal firm to ink long-term contracts for carbon discount companies that may cowl round 5 million tons of carbon dioxide per yr.
At the moment, power and trade produce about 37 billion tons of CO2 per yr globally.
Woods declined to offer particulars of the contracts, however stated U.S. subsidies in final yr’s Inflation Discount Act of as much as $85 a ton for carbon seize and sequestration would make the investments worthwhile.
“We’re primarily serving to clients decarbonize and benefiting from that tax credit score,” Woods stated.
He added that earning money from the offers was “in all probability a couple of years out.”
(Reuters – Reporting by Richard Valdmanis, enhancing by Katy Daigle)
