Surprise! Subpoena Reveals "Carbon Capture" Just Another Way To Pump More Oil (It Always Was)
Ed. - This is a long article, and a really good one. It also emphasizes that the oil majors (A) are fully aware that it cannot scale up and (B) they wouldn't even be using it as greenwash without massive govt. subsidies.
Last February, ExxonMobil announced it would further expand its only active carbon capture and storage (CCS) operation in the United States, located at a gas processing facility in LaBarge, Wyoming. Shute Creek is the world’s largest CCS project and has been operational for over 30 years. Although the oil giant publicly touts carbon capture as a “proven” climate solution, its own early foray reveals just how flimsy of a fix the technology really is — and how expensive, both for taxpayers and the climate. For starters, at Exxon’s Shute Creek, nearly all of the CO2 separated from the extracted fossil gas either has been sold, for a profit, to other drillers to use for squeezing out hard-to-recover oil elsewhere (a process called enhanced oil recovery) or vented back into the atmosphere. Only 3 percent of the Wyoming project’s CO2 has been geologically stored in the same formation from which the original gas was extracted, according to estimates from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
While Exxon has already spent millions on this project — and plans to invest up to $400 million more to expand it — Shute Creek has consistently fallen short of its carbon capture goals. Still, the company plans to double-down on CCS, making the underperforming technology an essential part of its billion-dollar blue hydrogen plans, which rely on fossil gas. Yet American taxpayers have been subsidizing the oil company’s purported climate endeavors through a federal tax credit for CCS, to the tune of perhaps $240 million claimed already. And as a trove of industry documents reveals, Exxon is far from the only fossil fuel company selling carbon capture as its golden ticket to continue pumping its products, despite internal concerns about the technology’s feasibility.
The internal documents obtained by the House Committee suggest that Big Oil views carbon capture technologies as a way to continue producing oil and gas for decades to come, well into an increasingly climate-constrained future. Prolonged oil and gas production is at odds with recent reports confirming that new fossil fuel development is incompatible with the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C and with the net-zero energy transition. Yet in public-facing materials from investor presentations to company websites, oil and gas companies reject this consensus — and claim that fossil fuels can remain viable and become “cleaner” with the help of carbon capture and storage. Recent federal legislation has provided a massive boost to carbon capture technologies, including direct air capture machines designed to remove CO2 from the ambient air. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in November 2021, included more than $12 billion in carbon capture investments, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed last August, significantly expanded the 45Q federal tax credit for carbon capture: raising its value, lowering the minimum capture requirement for qualifying facilities, and extending the window for projects to claim the credits.
EDIT
Shell has taken a similar stance as BP on the issue. In a November 2017 document marked “confidential,” Shell discusses the CCS opportunity in the U.S. Gulf Coast and seems to admit that its interest is centered on boosting the company’s fossil fuel products and reputation — not lessening climate change: “The value of CCS to Shell is the ability to decarbonize our products, retain a larger market share for our products in the energy transition, in addition to reputational value.” Industry critics point to statements like this as support for their argument that CCS is a false climate solution which won’t actually lead to the needed decrease in burning fossil fuels. “There it is plain as day, we can pretend to decarbonize our products, which they never will,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center. Internal documents from the U.S. oil and gas industry’s chief lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, further corroborate Davies’ views that CCS is effectively a tool to prop up oil and gas production even as the world lumbers toward more climate-conscious energy systems.
EDIT
https://www.desmog.com/2023/02/13/exxon-shell-bp-api-concerns-carbon-capture/
