© 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 Vitality Company’s latest declare that utilizing wide-scale carbon seize to combat local weather change was an implausible “phantasm”, saying the identical could possibly be mentioned about electrical automobiles and photo voltaic vitality.
“There is no such thing as a answer set on the market at present that’s on the scale to unravel the issue,” Woods instructed Reuters on the sidelines of the COP28 local weather summit in Dubai.
“So, you might say that about carbon seize at present, you might say that about electrical automobiles, about wind, about photo voltaic. I believe that criticism is reputable for something that we’re making an attempt to do, to begin with,” he mentioned.
Whereas few commercially viable carbon-capture initiatives exist as a result 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 big 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 world warming, versus a trigger.
The long run function of carbon seize expertise and fossil fuels is a key difficulty on the convention.
The IEA, the West’s vitality watchdog, issued a report on Nov. 27 simply forward of the COP28 gathering that mentioned the fossil gasoline business was going through a “second of reality” 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 “phantasm that implausibly massive 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 mentioned he believed oil and gasoline would play an “essential function” 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 will probably be linked to offshore blocks within the Gulf of Mexico the place Exxon plans to bury carbon.
Exxon has thus far satisfied the most important ammonia maker in the US, an industrial gasoline firm and a big metal firm to ink long-term contracts for carbon discount providers that will cowl round 5 million tons of carbon dioxide per 12 months.
Presently, vitality and business 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 basically serving to clients decarbonize and benefiting from that tax credit score,” Woods mentioned.
He added that earning money from the offers was “most likely a couple of years out.”
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