Exxon Wants 'Financial Incentive' for $100 Billion Carbon Capture Hub

"[L]ess than three months after the company announced plans to invest $3 billion into a new low-carbon solutions venture," Exxon has proposed a $100 billion carbon capture facility in Houston, citing the city's "large concentration of carbon-emitting industries" and "location near the Gulf of Mexico that could store large amounts of carbon dioxide safely and permanently," reports Paul Takahashi in the Houston Chronicle.

"The Irving oil major warned, however, that developing a so-called Houston CCS Innovation Zone -- billed as the biggest carbon sequestration project in the world -- would require a public-private partnership and government funding." Exxon is pushing for "an 'Innovation Zone' approach to dramatically accelerate Carbon Capture and Storage progress," calling for "the company along with many private and public partners to build a carbon capture facility to collect emissions from refineries, petrochemical plants and other industrial facilities along the Houston Ship Channel." The carbon would be stored in old oil and gas formations in the Gulf of Mexico, which is projected to have a capacity of 50 million tons of carbon dioxide annually by 2030, "more than all the carbon capture and storage projects operating globally" today.  

"While European oil majors are investing heavily in wind and solar energy to prepare for a low-carbon future, U.S. oil giants are hanging their cowboy hats on carbon capture and storage, the decades-old, but expensive technology of extracting carbon dioxide from the air and storing it in deep underground reservoirs." Yet local leaders praise the proposal as an important step. Bobby Tudor, chair of the Greater Houston Partnership's Energy Transition initiative, called the plan a "key milestone" in the "global energy transition to a low-carbon future."