There Were 32 "Carbon Capture" Plants Working Globally In 2023; 90% Of The CO2 They Captured Pumped More Oil

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The gung-ho tone of ExxonMobil’s advertising of CCS as a solution to climate change suggests the company was glossing over an important fact — it assumed some role for the technology, but only in combination with reduced demand for energy, and slower economic growth, and much less driving of petrol and diesel vehicles. For years, the oil giant, and much of the fossil fuel industry, knew that catching carbon was difficult and not profitable without government subsidies. Yet, ExxonMobil’s ads continued to present CCS as a way to continue burning fossil fuels and capture emissions before they entered the atmosphere. In reality, most CCS sites are used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a process where captured carbon dioxide (CO2) is injected underground to extract more oil. Critics say that burning that oil emits far more CO2 than what is captured, so this use of the technology doesn’t represent a viable solution to tackle climate change.

Out of 32 CCS commercial sites operating globally in 2023, 22 were used to extract more oil out of existing wells, according to the industry-backed Global CCS Institute. “More than 90 percent of the captured CO2 from [CCS] is used to extract oil,” June Sekera, a visiting scholar at the New School, told DeSmog. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cited her 2020 paper, “Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science and Societal Need,” in its 2022 Working Group III report.

Sekera’s research highlighted that carbon capture at power plants has been plagued by technical problems. “[CCS] is not going to make a significant contribution to reducing CO2 emissions even if it did work,” she told DeSmog, “and there are real ways to stop emissions going into the atmosphere, which is to switch to non-carbon sources.” “CCS consumes an enormous amount of power, and right now, all the projects that are operating capture the carbon and sequester it by burning more fossil fuels,” Charles Harvey, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works on carbon sequestration, noted. “So it’s a big increase for the market for oil companies, and the emissions from burning the fossil fuels that power CCS are just released into the atmosphere.”

In 2016, two years before Exxon developed Scenario D, the company launched new advertisements as part of its “Energy Lives Here” public relations campaign at the Rio Olympics, which featured its employees talking about how the company “powers the world responsibly,” including leading the industry on CCS. According to Kantar Media, the oil giant spent $73 million on corporate promotion advertising that year. An internal document released by the U.S. Senate Budget Committee last month showed that, after the Rio Olympics, on November 15, 2016, ExxonMobil executives met with public relations firm BBDO to discuss a new batch of ads highlighting CCS and low-carbon fuels. After the meeting, BBDO’s Brandon Fowler sent an email to members of ExxonMobil’s Public and Government Affairs team summarizing the proposed changes to ads discussing CCS: “Will replace any lines that imply the technology is live today, and more [sic] the solution more future focused (e.g. we’re building a plant to test this…).”

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https://www.desmog.com/2024/05/21/despite-advertising-carbon-capture-exxonmobil-saw-marginal-role-for-it-in-fighting-climate-change-shell/