Two US projects highlight divide over carbon removal’s role in climate fight
By Valerie Volcovici
(Reuters) -In Texas, oil and gas producer Occidental Petroleum (NYSE:OXY) is constructing a giant facility to suck 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere annually to keep it from warming the climate, a project backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from investment firm BlackRock (NYSE:BLK).
In Louisiana, a consortium of companies that includes Swiss firm Climeworks is teaming up to build a similar facility that can pull a million metric tons of the greenhouse gas out of the sky each year, boosted by hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. government.
The direct air capture (DAC) projects are in neighboring states, but the companies leading them are worlds away when it comes to their views on how carbon removal — an expensive and largely unproven family of technologies to fight or even reverse global warming — should be deployed in a climate-friendly future and the role oil and gas should play in its deployment.
Occidental says some of its carbon would be injected into oil fields to ramp up pressure and raise crude production – a strategy it says that can cleanse the world’s future fossil fuel consumption of climate impact.
Climeworks and its partner Heirloom, meanwhile, says its carbon will go straight into underground storage, and that the technology must go hand in hand with a transition to renewable energy.
The clashing philosophies mirror a global debate underway over the role carbon removal technologies should play to keep the world from exceeding a 1.5 degree Celsius rise that will take center stage at the 28th United Nations climate change conference in Dubai on Nov. 30-Dec. 12.
The COP28 conference's hosts, OPEC member the United Arab Emirates, is
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