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© 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 Picture
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 “phantasm”, saying the identical could possibly be stated about electrical automobiles and photo voltaic power.
“There isn’t a answer set on the market at present that’s on the scale to resolve the issue,” Woods advised Reuters on the sidelines of the COP28 local weather summit in Dubai.
“So, you could possibly say that about carbon seize at present, you could possibly say that about electrical automobiles, about wind, about photo voltaic. I feel that criticism is reputable for something that we’re attempting to do, to start out with,” he stated.
Whereas few commercially viable carbon-capture initiatives exist as a consequence of 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 firms worldwide to recast themselves as a part of the answer to international warming, versus a trigger.
The longer term function of carbon seize know-how and fossil fuels is a key difficulty on the convention.
The IEA, the West’s power watchdog, issued a report on Nov. 27 simply forward of the COP28 gathering that stated the fossil gasoline business was going through a “second of fact” the place producers had to decide on between deepening the local weather disaster, or shifting to wash power.
It slammed oil and gasoline firms that argue drilling can proceed indefinitely so long as the emissions from combusting them are cleaned up, saying the business was sustaining an “phantasm that implausibly giant quantities of carbon seize are the answer”.
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 “necessary function” on this planet by means of 2050, however declined to supply 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 will likely be linked to offshore blocks within the Gulf of Mexico the place Exxon plans to bury carbon.
Exxon has to date satisfied the biggest ammonia maker in the USA, an industrial gasoline firm and a big metal firm to ink long-term contracts for carbon discount companies that may cowl round 5 million tons of carbon dioxide per yr.
Presently, power and business produce about 37 billion tons of CO2 per yr globally.
Woods declined to supply 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 primarily serving to prospects decarbonize and profiting from that tax credit score,” Woods stated.
He added that getting cash from the offers was “in all probability a number of years out.”
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