Exxon Pimps Net-Zero Pledge As New Plastics Plant Goes Online To Tune Of 3.5 Million Tons CO2/Year
The same day ExxonMobil announced its ambition to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, word spread that its mammoth plastics manufacturing complex near Corpus Christi, Texas, had begun production. “We are up and operating. We have been for a while,” Paul B. Fritsch, site manager for ExxonMobil’s joint venture with Saudi Basic Industries Corp, (SABIC), told the governing body of the Port of Corpus Christi at its Jan. 18 meeting.
The facility, known as an ethane steam cracker, will feed the production of nurdles – tiny pellets that serve as raw materials for plastic products. The plant’s state air permit allows it to send more than 3.5 million tons per year of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The irony of promising net-zero emissions while firing up a greenhouse-gas polluter was not lost on some critics. “Pledging to make your operations ‘net zero’ when your entire raison d’etre is to continue producing the fossil fuels destroying the livable world: this is like pledging to become more energy-efficient when your business is manufacturing electric chairs,” Genevieve Guenther, an author and activist who specializes in fossil-fuel industry disinformation, wrote on Twitter the day of ExxonMobil’s announcement.
The ExxonMobil-SABIC partnership, known as Gulf Coast Growth Ventures (GCGV), began construction of the plant in once-rural San Patricio County, on Texas’ Coastal Bend, in 2019. The GCGV facility is in addition to 31 new petrochemical projects along the Texas and Louisiana coasts that collectively will generate 50 million tons of greenhouse-gas pollution — the equivalent of 11 new coal-fired power plants, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization.
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https://www.desmog.com/2022/01/27/exxon-sabic-gulf-coast-plastics-greenhouse-gas-pollution/
