Occidental Is First US Oil Major To Target Net Zero Emissions 52
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BNN Bloomberg: Occidental Petroleum Corp. became the first major U.S. oil producer to aim for net zero emissions from everything it extracts and sells, accelerating an industry trend that's become commonplace in Europe. The Houston-based company announced a target to reach net zero emissions from its own operations by 2040 and an ambition to do the same from customers' use of its products by 2050, Chief Executive Officer Vicki Hollub said during a conference call with analysts on Tuesday. The plan relies heavily on capturing carbon dioxide and burying it, a technology that's so far been prohibitively expensive.
Occidental's announcement is significant because the company has one of the biggest footprints in the Permian Basin, the sprawling oil field beneath Texas and New Mexico that produces more crude than any other region on the continent. [...] Occidental is aiming to reduce all three categories of emissions. Scope 1 involves pollution emanating directly from company operations, while Scope 2 includes indirect emissions from utilities selling power to the company, and similar sources. Scope 3 -- the category most U.S. oil drillers have so far excluded -- involves pollution farthest removed from a company's control, such as consumers burning refined fuels like gasoline. It would be the first major U.S. oil company to target Scope 3 emissions, according to BloombergNEF. "Key to achieving Occidental's targets is building the world's largest so-called direct-air capture plant in the Permian region," the report adds. "The facility will pull CO2 from the air and concentrate it to be either stored underground or used to help push crude out of old wells."
"Occidental plans to use its carbon-capture business, named 1PointFive, to generate cash for investment in new facilities. The carbon-capture business probably will generate as much cash flow as Occidental's chemicals business within 10 to 15 years."
Occidental's announcement is significant because the company has one of the biggest footprints in the Permian Basin, the sprawling oil field beneath Texas and New Mexico that produces more crude than any other region on the continent. [...] Occidental is aiming to reduce all three categories of emissions. Scope 1 involves pollution emanating directly from company operations, while Scope 2 includes indirect emissions from utilities selling power to the company, and similar sources. Scope 3 -- the category most U.S. oil drillers have so far excluded -- involves pollution farthest removed from a company's control, such as consumers burning refined fuels like gasoline. It would be the first major U.S. oil company to target Scope 3 emissions, according to BloombergNEF. "Key to achieving Occidental's targets is building the world's largest so-called direct-air capture plant in the Permian region," the report adds. "The facility will pull CO2 from the air and concentrate it to be either stored underground or used to help push crude out of old wells."
"Occidental plans to use its carbon-capture business, named 1PointFive, to generate cash for investment in new facilities. The carbon-capture business probably will generate as much cash flow as Occidental's chemicals business within 10 to 15 years."
How progressive of them (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish I had a nickel for each time I was presented something to read that green energy would "cost jobs" and "wreck the economy" and "cause America to lose its leadership." I could almost swear that once or twice it was stated that doing this was "against what God wanted."
Always by "conservative" pundits, politicians and their pet analysts. Always on the wrong side of history. Why do we pay any attention to them anymore?
Re:How progressive of them (Score:4, Interesting)
I watched a very interesting presentation from someone advocating for an all "green" energy economy and was quite honest on what this would mean for the economy. She recognized that wind, solar, hydro, and whatever else they considered "green" does not have near the same EROEI (energy return on energy investment) as nuclear fission and fossil fuels. What she proposed was a kind of managed decline in the standard of living for society.
With the lower EROEI comes higher costs in energy. This might not mean a higher price because the value of a dollar can shift like any commodity. This means flying in aircraft will be outside of the realm of anyone but the most wealthy. It means people will not have near the same ability to travel, and what travel they do have will be far slower.
This is only true because the presenter left out nuclear power as a "green" energy source. With nuclear power we don't have to have a managed decline in our economy. We could still fly in aircraft at a price that most any working family could afford, and maintain a net zero carbon emissions, by using synthesized fuels.
The reason you keep hearing that it would cost jobs and destroy the economy is because it is true. The way out is nuclear power.
After the Democrat's Green New Deal fell flat it became clear that this would not be accepted by the public. Last summer the Democrats added support for nuclear power to their party platform. Very soon I expect them to act like they always supported nuclear power, hoping people will forget that they held up the advancement of a "green" economy for nearly 50 years.
Re: How progressive of them (Score:5, Interesting)
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How long ago / outdated was that presentation?
It's relevant enough that the Democrat part did a complete reversal on nuclear power last August. If they still believed it viable to maintain the economy without nuclear power then they'd maintain their stance. After nearly 50 years of being anti-nuclear where is the Democrat constituency demanding nuclear power? I'll tell you, it's in the people that did the math on what a future without nuclear power looks like.
They could maintain this fiction so long as there was the promise of a future where solar p
Re: How progressive of them (Score:1)
You never get the message do you, nobody wants nukes.
You never follow the logic, do you; few will be willing to flush their living standards down the toilet to appease their fears.
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Define 'reliable'? Solar + wind + big battery [pv-tech.org] is lauded for its added stability to the grid.
Tesla big battery. [reneweconomy.com.au] Fully paid for itself in 2.5 years [tesmanian.com]. That's right, after 2.5 years the whole cost of building it was paid for by the profits it generated.
Solar + wind + big battery is not only cheaper, but also more stable than natural gas or coal or nuclear.
There is a massive disruption going on. Tony Seba [youtube.com] has predicted this in 2014 alre
Re: How progressive of them (Score:4, Informative)
The guy you're replying to is a Trumptard. Go look at his posting history. He's scared Biden will make gasoline engines illegal on the first day of his presidency and also Kamala will stop by one day to rough him up until he installs better insulation.
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He's scared [...] Kamala will stop by one day to rough him up until he installs better insulation.
A lot of people would probably pay for that kind of treatment... but not enough to make nuclear viable economically.
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The use of the term "the Democrat party" is a tell.
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Why are you obsessed with the largely meaningless EROEI metric? Oh right, because it favours nuclear...
Energy Returned On Energy Invested doesn't tell you anything about emissions or pollution. Coal looks great for EROEI because you can just ignore the fact that it's really dirty and causes climate change.
What matters is the total lifetime greenhouse gas emissions and the amount and nature of the pollution.
Oh and competitiveness, because even if you had a complete clean source of energy that actually sucked
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God wouldn't have put all those species there if he didn't want us to make them go extinct would he.
It's practice for when the aliens invade.
Texas proves you wrong (Score:2)
We invested $7 billion in transmission lines from West Texas and the Pan Handle to our population centers [wfaa.com] resulting in us become the #1 producer of Wind Power in the US [wikipedia.org], with almost as much as capacity as the next 4 states combined:
And looking forward our grid additions* thru 2023 [chron.com] will be:
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We invested ...
Who is this "we" you are referring to? I don't think it was the pundits, politicians, and their pet analysts.
No, it wasn't. It was done by business interests -- startups and established energy companies -- liberal or conservative -- who were expressly not listening to the "conservative" voices that have been nattering about the socialist horror of green energy for decades. All I was suggesting is that the rest of us don't either.
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Who is this "we" you are referring to? I don't think it was the pundits, politicians, and their pet analysts.
We, as in we the people of Texas, did - [texastribune.org]
This came to fruition under the leadership of Governor Rick Perry.
The Perry Legacy: Energy [texastribune.org]
No mention of carbon neutral fuels? (Score:3)
I'm disappointed that there was no mention of carbon neutral synthetic fuels. This is a technology that is a direct replacement for petroleum based fuels, closes the carbon loop for existing uses of hydrocarbon fuels, and I expect it to be a natural answer to the problems of carbon emissions from a company that is heavily invested in petro-chemicals.
What might answer why they don't want to bring this up is producing synthetic hydrocarbon fuels takes energy, and so the question will be where this energy is going to come from. For a company with no investments in solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, or nuclear fission this means turning to the competition for this energy. For more diverse energy and chemical companies they would not face this dilemma.
If Occidental Petroleum Corp wants to keep the tree huggers at a distance then they need to diversify their energy investments. Perhaps have some kind of merger with a more "green" company. But then a company that buys Occidental Petroleum Corp would face their own problems with the tree huggers.
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I'm disappointed that there was no mention of carbon neutral synthetic fuels.
We're going to see a lot of companies address this in different ways. The reality is carbon neutral fuels will have to be a core part of this so called Scope 3 because carbon capture alone is not going to be a one size fits all solution, much like nuclear power isn't a one size fits all solution.
That said carbon neutral fuel alone also won't be effective because while we can run our cars on corn it's significantly harder to make high-impact plastics from it. Petrochemicals is still a thing and I suspect tha
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That said carbon neutral fuel alone also won't be effective because while we can run our cars on corn it's significantly harder to make high-impact plastics from it.
We can reduce our use of plastics, though. For example, with more clean energy the environmental cost of aluminum goes way down. We can build more stuff out of metal again. Aluminum is also very cheap to recycle, both because it takes much less energy to melt it down than it does steel, and also because we can use automated laser spectroscopy to identify alloys. That lets us bin them as appropriate, which is important because recycled aluminum has characteristics identical to the original alloy (less any he
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I'm disappointed that there was no mention of carbon neutral synthetic fuels.
We're going to see a lot of companies address this in different ways. The reality is carbon neutral fuels will have to be a core part of this so called Scope 3 because carbon capture alone is not going to be a one size fits all solution, much like nuclear power isn't a one size fits all solution.
That said carbon neutral fuel alone also won't be effective because while we can run our cars on corn it's significantly harder to make high-impact plastics from it.
It's also a really radical change in business model.
What Occidental is saying is they'll still pull fossil fuels from the ground, burn them, and they're adding a "capture the carbon" stage. Occidental still is harvesting energy from pre-existing energy stores.
Switching to synthetic fuels turns this on it's head: buy carbon-free electricity from someone, harvest carbon from the air, generate synthetic fuel, burn the fuel. No drilling or mining involved. Occidental essentially changes from an energy productio
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Carbon neutral synthetic fuels don't fix the other big problem with fossil fuels - pollution. I don't want to breath those emissions, thanks.
Hydrogen of course only produces water vapour but anything which produces soot and other particulates when combusted is no good.
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Hydrogen as a fuel is still theoretical. We don't know how to economically store it, move it, produce it, or turn it into useful energy. Of course hydrogen as a fuel is used in space applications all the time but that's a long way from people getting it at a corner filling station. On-site and on-demand production can solve many problems of storage and transport but that removes the economy of scale from large production facilities.
Synthetic hydrocarbon fuels on the other hand is a century old process, a
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Strange, Toyota seems to have been selling hydrogen fuelled cars for a few years now. You better tell them it's still theoretical.
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Theoretical was the wrong word, but you can count on you-know-who to be wrong every time so no big shock there. The right word is "stupid". Using hydrogen to move cars around is ridiculous. It's inefficient and hazardous even compared to highly flammable batteries, let alone next-generation chemistries or compositions. If glass electrolyte pans out this time (good luck, Goodenough) it will hopefully nail hydrogen's coffin down permanently.
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I actually agree. Hydrogen makes sense for aircraft and some shipping though. Maybe some specialist freight too.
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Just remember that wood is considered a carbon-neutral fuel. [yale.edu]
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Just remember that wood is considered a carbon-neutral fuel.
It is! But it's also polluting, producing significant quantities of PM2.5 carbon soot, and of dioxin, both of which are carcinogenic.
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carbon neutral synthetic fuels
There's no mention of them because they are dumb. They take too much energy to make to be worth using anywhere but possibly in the military, which has already chosen hydrogen as their "synthetic fuel" of choice. (There's no hydrogen well; they're making it through electrolysis). Military use is one of the few places where nuclear power makes sense, and they have reactors not producing peak output just sitting around for long periods, fully crewed and fueled. It makes sense to use them, and improve ROI.
It si
2050 targets are non-actionable greenwashing (Score:4, Insightful)
So why does the operations target get 20 years and the end-product emissions target only another 10 years.
Oil and gas companies in my country are attempting to pull the wool over peoples' eyes by promising to reduce emissions, but when you look at the details, it is only small emission reductions in company operations such as exploration, extraction, and transport of the product. Again, those emissions are completely dwarfed by the end-use emissions.
This is a distraction. It's not going to get us to the 50% reduction in GHG emissions that scientists say the world economy needs to achieve over the next decade.
Re:2050 targets are non-actionable greenwashing (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to go carbon neutral is to stop digging and drilling from below the ground.
If an oil company is proposing anything other than this as a way to be carbon neutral, you know they are lying.
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False. If you can extract carbon from the air you can offset the carbon from the ground. Carbon neutral is not whatever you define it to be, it's a very simple math equation, and you're allowed to use -ve symbols as well it doesn't need to be 0 = 0.
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The only way to go carbon neutral is to stop digging and drilling from below the ground.
If an oil company is proposing anything other than this as a way to be carbon neutral, you know they are lying.
I definitely see your point, and most exercises like these are just pure marketing blah. But at the same time, they could have chosen what many of their competitors have chosen, which is to ignore the whole thing and hope nobody notices for as long as possible. Their contribution is very small, but there is a momentum building across industries, which only a few years back would be unthinkable. So instead of hammering them for not doing enough, I'd rather congratulate them on doing something, ask their comp
Net zero hydrocarbons are like plastic recycling (Score:1)
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You post this in an article talking about an oil and gas producer in your country specifically targeting the emissions you say they are ignoring...
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The point is even conventional o
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Greenwashing is a proven marketing tactic.
Net Zero (Score:2)
Net Zero? They can do much better than Dial-up Internet!
Are they including the dinosaur farts? (Score:1)
that created the oil to begin with?
What about the decaying plant material that died as a result of the dinosaur eating some of it or walking on it?
No?
Zero emissions is a fraud! There is always emission of something at some point in creating, using, disposing, breaking down, recycling, thinking about, writing about
Can we do better than today? Yes, as we are doing better than 100 years ago. But true zero emission is just marketing hype and fraud.
Good start, but not enough (Score:2)
1. We need hard, binding, verifiable targets for 2021, 2022 etc. 2040/2050 targets can and will slip.
2. DAC seems to be hugely inefficient. Why not capture the stuff where you still have it at high concentrations, just after the combustion?
3. We'll need a 'scope 4': Compensate everything that you extracted in your past operations.
On the positive side, the more oil companies commit to similar compensation, even if only by press announcment, the harder it becomes for the others to continue doing nothing.
Lies (Score:2)
This is greenwashing.
With gas stations going out of business due to EV adoption, ICE drivers will have range anxiety and switch to EVs at an accelerated pace. These oil companies are grasping at straws to stay in business another 10 years.
Trying to set their own time table (Score:2)
How does one make money with sequestration? (Score:2)
Seriously...how does one make money with sequestration? Especially so much that they plan to make it a major part of their revenue?
Government subsidies? I donâ(TM)t get it.