Exxon Mobil CEO rebuffs IEA criticism of carbon capture strategy By Reuters – Canada Boosts

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 struggle local weather change was an implausible “illusion”, saying the identical could possibly be mentioned about electrical autos and photo voltaic power.

“There is no solution set out there today that is at the scale to solve the problem,” Woods instructed 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 mentioned.

Whereas few commercially viable carbon-capture tasks exist attributable to excessive prices, EVs now make up about 13% of the worldwide new car market, and photo voltaic and wind deployments have been increasing quickly.

Woods’ look marked the primary time a CEO of fossil gasoline big Exxon has attended one of many annual U.N.-sponsored local weather summits, and mirrored a rising effort amongst oil and fuel corporations worldwide to recast themselves as a part of the answer to international warming, versus a trigger.

The long run position of carbon seize expertise and fossil fuels is a key problem on the convention.

The IEA, the West’s power watchdog, issued a report on Nov. 27 simply forward of the COP28 gathering that mentioned the fossil gasoline trade was going through a “moment of truth” the place producers had to decide on between deepening the local weather disaster, or shifting to scrub power.

It slammed oil and fuel corporations that argue drilling can proceed indefinitely so long as the emissions from combusting them are cleaned up, saying the trade 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 fuel emissions are the issue inflicting local weather change, not the fossil fuels themselves.

He mentioned he believed oil and fuel would play an “important role” on the planet by 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 can be linked to offshore blocks within the Gulf of Mexico the place Exxon plans to bury carbon.

Exxon has up to now satisfied the most important ammonia maker in america, an industrial fuel firm and a big metal firm to ink long-term contracts for carbon discount providers that might cowl round 5 million tons of carbon dioxide per 12 months.

At present, power and trade produce about 37 billion tons of CO2 per 12 months globally.

Woods declined to offer particulars of the contracts, however mentioned U.S. subsidies in final 12 months’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 mentioned.

He added that being profitable from the offers was “probably a few years out.”

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