Consider This from NPR - When Big Oil Gets In The Carbon Removal Game, Who Wins?

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Giant machines sucking carbon dioxide out of the air to fight climate change sounds like science fiction, but it's close to becoming a reality, with billions of dollars of support from the U.S. government. And a key player in this growing industry is a U.S. oil company, Occidental Petroleum.With a major petroleum company deploying this technology, it begs the question, is it meant to save the planet or the oil industry? NPR's Camila Domonoske reports.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. If you've ever driven yourself crazy trying to squeeze the last few drops of shampoo out of the bottle, then you probably have some idea of a dilemma facing oil companies. How do you get all the oil out of a well? Except instead of a plastic bottle, the oil is stuck in rocks, thousands of feet underground. Like this rock, now in geologist Bob Trenton's lab at UT Permian Basin in West Texas.

See these little holes here? Those little holes are where the oil lives. After the first gush of oil, it gets harder and harder to squeeze more out, even though there's still lots of oil stuck underground, which kind of makes sense because oil is sticky. You change the oil in your car, which nobody does anymore, but you get oil all over your hands. Well, you can use a rag to get most of it off, but it's going to stay there until you use a detergent. Now it turns out that a great way to get oil unstuck from those rocks is to use carbon dioxide. You pressurize it, inject it deep

underground, and you can squeeze more oil out of old wells. It's kind of like Mr. Clean. It gets in there and it scrubs some of the oil off the pores and produce more oil. Great, but this is where things get a little weird. You see, there is technology, technology that until recently was seen as pretty fringy, that makes it possible to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. It's called direct air capture. And major environmental groups say this technology, that is pulling carbon we've already emitted back out of the air, will play a key role in the fight against climate change. President Biden has given it a shout out in his climate speeches. We have to address the carbon that can't be avoided or that's already in our atmosphere.

My administration is investing in the design and development of technologies like direct air capture. OK, so what happens when an oil company pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, but uses that carbon dioxide to pull more oil out of the ground? I mean, is that good or bad for the climate? Consider this. A major U.S. oil company is betting big on direct air capture. Are they helping build a sustainable green industry? Or hijacking a climate technology for fossil fuel profit? From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply.

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. It's Consider This from NPR. Picture it, giant machines sucking carbon dioxide out of the air to fight climate change. I mean, this sounds like the stuff of sci-fi, but it's poised to become reality, with billions of dollars of support from the U.S. government.

And as we mentioned, a key player in this growing industry is a U.S. oil company. NPR's Camila Dominovsky reports on new technology and old tensions. Earlier this year, on a windy bare patch of red dirt near No Trees, Texas, a celebration kicked off. In a big white tent, there were sliders to eat, a stage, a robot dog for some reason. What is the robot dog doing? I never got an answer to that. This was a groundbreaking for Stratos, a billion-dollar plant to pull carbon dioxide out of the sky. Major climate groups say this technology will be essential to the fight against climate change.

But this party was not thrown by climate activists, but by an oil company. Let's back up. We've spent more than a century filling the atmosphere with huge quantities of carbon dioxide, changing the climate of the entire planet. Most of that carbon came from burning fossil fuels. So the idea that we could just build machines to pull that carbon back out? It sounded almost too good to be true, to be honest. Richard Jackson is a top executive at Occidental Petroleum, or Oxy for short, a big American oil company. Several years ago, they started seriously considering this technology called direct air capture. This is about clawing back carbon already in the air. Take a deep breath. You just inhaled a lot of nitrogen, some oxygen, and a tiny bit of carbon dioxide. These plants, to suck out that carbon, they can be built anywhere.

You know, we drew a circle on the board and put a dot on it and said, okay, really, is that, you know, is that plant going to make a difference? The circle was the Earth. The dot, a direct air capture plant, a big industrial facility, extracting that carbon from the sky so it can be used or stored instead of fueling climate change. Jackson was skeptical at first. I guess we got comfortable. Comfortable enough to start planning billion-dollar projects. This technology is key to Oxy's unusual plan to stop contributing to climate change while still making oil. Oxy started partnering with a company called Carbon

Engineering. In 2018, NPR took a tour of its industrial facility in rainy British Columbia. These are the sounds of huge fans moving air while flowing liquids absorb carbon dioxide. So you can actually hear, kind of sounds like a waterfall. Jenny McAhill, a chemist and engineer, was leading that tour. She explained the chemical reactions, why they need high heat, and ultimately how... Right now we are capturing CO2 from the atmosphere.

This is doable, but it takes a ton of energy. That means even more emissions you have to capture along the way. And it means this process is expensive. So expensive that just a few years ago, it was an open question whether anybody would ever pay to do this at a huge scale. That is not a question anymore. McAhill, who led that tour back in British Columbia, she was also at that party in dusty, gusty, no trees Texas.

It was Oxy's party and a long-awaited dream come true for her. We are at the groundbreaking for the direct air capture plant that we're building out here in Texas. Occidental Petroleum is now buying carbon engineering, and it plans to build a lot of these plants. The first one is designed to capture half a million metric tons of CO2 per year. And in one sense, that's nothing. The world will have released that much carbon by the time you're finished listening to this radio piece. In another sense, it's huge. A hundred times bigger than anyone's built before. It's really exciting to actually be able to see this all come together and the enthusiasm that's in the room.

Or in the tent, rather. Outside, there wasn't much to see yet. A brand new road and a couple of excavators. The earth is being moved and groundworks are being prepared. Michael Avery is the head of the Oxy arm that's building this plant. This project takes a lot of the same expertise as Oxy's oil and gas projects, and just a fraction of Oxy's substantial cash. As Avery and I were speaking, the wind picked up, which was appropriate.

In a couple of years, according to plan, a lot of air will be moving through here, through huge fans, across huge air contactors, capturing lots of CO2 and then... The CO2 will travel on a short pipeline to a well in that direction, which is where it will be sequestered underground. Sucking carbon from the sky is expensive. But if you can prove you've stored it underground forever, the government and some companies will pay for providing that service to the planet. Alternately, if you inject that CO2 near an old oil well, you can squeeze more oil out of the ground. Occidental Petroleum plans to do

both. But CEO Vicky Holub prefers the make more oil option. You actually do produce a net zero barrel of oil. Net zero oil. She sees a huge market for it. And bigger picture, she wants to use this tech to allow the world to combat climate change and keep using oil. It's really going to take oil to be produced for decades to come. And if it's produced in the way that I'm talking about, there's no reason not to produce oil and gas forever. That sound you just heard was a lot of climate and energy experts screaming in frustration.

Because yes, the world will use oil and gas for decades at least. But the question, and it's a crucial question, is how much oil will we burn? Climate advocates want to cut emissions sharply. Holub focuses on canceling them out. The more we cancel, she argues, the less we have to cut, the more oil we can use. But carbon removal takes enormous amounts of energy. And for many climate advocates, this is not why they fought for this technology. No. Carbon removal, we have to remove carbon and reduce emissions. If we use carbon removal instead of reducing emissions, we are not going to meet our climate goals. That's Erin Burns, the executive director of Carbon 180. Her nonprofit vocally supports this

tech, but is skeptical of oil and gas involvement. It's one symptom of the sometimes mixed feelings in the odd coalition of industry groups, green groups, and Oxy that lobbied for all these government incentives. And I met someone else in West Texas who seemed to be the very embodiment of those environmentalists' fears, an independent oilman named Wayman Pitchford in Midland. He was happy about Oxy's new direct air capture plant, but not because it'll be good for the planet. He thinks that's nonsense. It would be like draining the ocean with straws.

But it shuts some people up. Specifically, he thinks it will shut up people who keep talking about carbon emissions and the need to cut oil consumption. So let's go run out there and build all these plants we can build. Shut up whoever we need to shut up. The history of carbon offsets is littered with things that sounded like wins, but turned out to be closer to cons. Pitchford isn't particularly concerned whether or not net zero oil is actually zero carbon in the end, his hope, and some environmentalists' fear,

is that direct air capture will be a distraction, simply used to derail climate efforts. So is this a win for the planet? A pragmatic compromise? Or is the oil industry pulling a fast one on the climate movement? The answer doesn't just depend on what Oxy does. It will depend on what the rest of the world does in response. Politicians, companies, people like you. Will they treat direct air capture as a tool to speed up efforts to cut emissions? Or as an excuse to slow them down? That's NPR's Camila Dominovsky.

NPR's Jeff Brady also contributed to this report. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.