Congressional Hearings Display Farcical Carbon Capture Plans As Big Oil Reaps Tax Credits For Same

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If you’ve read the New York Times recently, or seen this ad on Politico’s website or heard it on one of its podcasts, or listened to the Planet Money podcast, you may have noticed the industry’s relentlessly positive marketing of carbon capture, which aims to collect and store CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial and fossil fuel extraction facilities, so they don’t add to global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said carbon capture might be necessary to reduce the emissions of certain “hard to abate” sectors like steel, concrete, and some chemical manufacturing, but noted that in the best-case scenario, with carbon capture technology working flawlessly and deployed at large scale, it could only account for a little over 2 percent of global carbon emissions reductions by 2030.

That hasn’t stopped major oil companies from claiming that carbon capture and storage “will be essential for helping society achieve net-zero emissions,” that they are delivering “carbon capture for American industry,” working on reducing emissions in their own businesses (also referred to as “carbon intensity”), and delivering “heavy industry with low emissions.” But internal documents obtained during the federal investigation, as well as information that industry whistleblowers shared with Drilled and Vox, reveal an industry that is decidedly more realistic about the emissions-reduction potential of carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, than it presents publicly.

In 2018, the oil and gas company Shell released an updated energy scenario, a forecast that served as a standard for the rest of the oil industry, in which it laid out what the Washington Post called a “radical” new approach on climate. Beginning in 1965, Shell pioneered the now-common practice of “scenario planning” for oil companies: mapping out what the industry and the world are likely to look like in the future; other oil companies will still often compare their scenarios to Shell’s. Exxon’s own internal 2018 scenario comparison was included in the most recent batch of documents handed over to Senate and House investigators. In it, ExxonMobil compared its future projections with Shell’s rosiest forecast for the energy transition. Buried in a chart in that projection is ExxonMobil’s belief about the global potential for CCS.

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Exxon’s low internal projections for CCS back in 2018 map to the company’s own experience with the technology, too. To date, the only “successful” carbon capture project Exxon points to in its materials is its LaBarge Shute Creek gas facility in Wyoming. The Shute Creek facility is often referenced by the industry in general as a successful large and longstanding CCS project. On paper, LaBarge is responsible for around 40 percent of the total carbon emissions ever captured in the world. But the details tell a different story. According to Exxon’s own disclosures and an analysis conducted by IEEFA in 2022, only around 3 percent of the carbon captured there (roughly 6 million tonnes) has been permanently sequestered underground. Of the rest of the 240 million tonnes of carbon emitted over the facility’s first 35 years in operation, half has been sold to various oilfield operators for enhanced oil recovery, or EOR — a process by which oil companies inject carbon underground to get more oil out — and approximately 120 million tonnes has been vented into the atmosphere.

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https://www.vox.com/climate/363076/climate-change-solution-shell-exxon-mobil-carbon-capture