© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, reacts on the Asia-Pacific Financial Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in San Francisco, California, U.S., November 15, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photograph
DUBAI (Reuters) – Exxon Mobil (NYSE:) CEO Darren Woods on Saturday rejected the Worldwide Power Company’s current declare that utilizing wide-scale carbon seize to combat local weather change was an implausible “illusion”, saying the identical might be stated about electrical automobiles and photo voltaic vitality.
“There is no solution set out there today that is at the scale to solve the problem,” Woods informed Reuters on the sidelines of the COP28 local weather summit in Dubai.
“So, you could say that about carbon capture today, you could say that about electric vehicles, about wind, about solar. I think that criticism is legitimate for anything that we’re trying to do, to start with,” he stated.
Whereas few commercially viable carbon-capture tasks exist attributable to excessive prices, EVs now make up about 13% of the worldwide new automobile market, and photo voltaic and wind deployments have been increasing quickly.
Woods’ look marked the primary time a CEO of fossil gasoline large Exxon has attended one of many annual U.N.-sponsored local weather summits, and mirrored a rising effort amongst oil and gasoline corporations worldwide to recast themselves as a part of the answer to international warming, versus a trigger.
The longer term function of carbon seize expertise and fossil fuels is a key subject on the convention.
The IEA, the West’s vitality watchdog, issued a report on Nov. 27 simply forward of the COP28 gathering that stated the fossil gasoline business was dealing with a “moment of truth” the place producers had to decide on between deepening the local weather disaster, or shifting to wash vitality.
It slammed oil and gasoline corporations that argue drilling can proceed indefinitely so long as the emissions from combusting them are cleaned up, saying the business was sustaining an “illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution”.
Exxon has introduced $17 billion of funding in its low carbon enterprise, which incorporates carbon seize, and has argued that greenhouse gasoline emissions are the issue inflicting local weather change, not the fossil fuels themselves.
He stated he believed oil and gasoline would play an “important role” on this planet by means of 2050, however declined to offer an estimate for demand ranges.
As a part of Exxon’s low carbon technique, it introduced in July a $4.9 billion acquisition of Denbury and its 1,300-mile (2,100-kilometer) carbon dioxide pipeline community, which shall be linked to offshore blocks within the Gulf of Mexico the place Exxon plans to bury carbon.
Exxon has to this point satisfied the biggest ammonia maker in america, an industrial gasoline firm and a big metal firm to ink long-term contracts for carbon discount providers that may cowl round 5 million tons of carbon dioxide per yr.
Presently, vitality and business produce about 37 billion tons of CO2 per yr globally.
Woods declined to offer particulars of the contracts, however stated U.S. subsidies in final yr’s Inflation Discount Act of as much as $85 a ton for carbon seize and sequestration would make the investments worthwhile.
“We’re essentially helping customers decarbonize and taking advantage of that tax credit,” Woods stated.
He added that earning profits from the offers was “probably a few years out.”
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