Strategic Positioning

In an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal the CEO of ExxonMobil and the president of its Low Carbon Solutions arm, Darren W. Woods and Joe Blommaert, explain how the company is positioned to benefit from the carbon capture and sequestration funding in President Biden’s infrastructure plan:

About 80% of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions come from three critical sectors of the economy: power generation, commercial transportation and industrial manufacturing. Meaningful progress toward achieving the world’s climate goals requires emission reductions from these sectors.

One of the proven technologies available that could play a major role is carbon capture and storage, or CCS, the process of sequestering industrial emissions and safely storing them permanently underground. CCS also promises the potential to reduce carbon emissions significantly at a cost competitive to other solutions, especially for the manufacturing sector.

For the past three years at ExxonMobil we have been studying the concept of creating multiuser CCS “hubs” in industrial areas. They would be located near safe geologic storage sites. A CCS Innovation Zone would bring together government incentives and private-sector investment.

IMO CCS is a worthwhile technology for R&D. It’s also something that would require subsidization to make it pay although the subsidies could take a variety of different forms.

There are even better prospective approaches. Imagine a world of plentiful, cheap, highly available energy whose generation doesn’t produce carbon emissions. Captured carbon dioxide could be split into its component elements—carbon and oxygen. The carbon could be reused in a variety of ways including to produce fuel.

All sorts of things become practical in such a world. And to my eye the most likely path to such a world runs through small modular nuclear reactors.