Occidental Petroleum is investing in billion-dollar projects to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. The effort is raising hopes — and eyebrows
By Daniel Estrin, Camila Domonoske
3-Minute Listen / Transcript available
Occidental Petroleum is investing in billion-dollar projects to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. The effort is raising hopes — and eyebrows
By Daniel Estrin, Camila Domonoske
3-Minute Listen / Transcript available
Quote:
So Occidental Petroleum, a big American oil company, they are really good at a kind of oil production that involves injecting CO2 underground to squeeze more oil out of old wells. So when they heard about this technology to pull carbon out of the sky, they thought, wait; this could work for us. They plan to put some carbon underground just to store it.
This is worse than a zero sum game. Every litre of oil produces multiple litres of CO2 gas.
Sorry, but not that uplifting at all.
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Technically, it’s uplifting if you are a deposit of oil.
Doesn’t that mean that the oil produced here emits less net CO2? Since CO2 was used to extract it, taking it out of the atmosphere, that mean that the entire process of extraction and consumption emits less net CO2 than more traditional methods.
Hardly carbon neutral, but an improvement.
CO2 is a gas. It’s not going to stay underground.
Gasses can definitely be trapped underground. That’s where we mine methane, ethane,and propane.
You don’t think it would just come back out the same hole they pulled the oil out of when they’re done? Or that the cavern they just created would collapse, releasing the gas at some point?
No, they can cap those off pretty well. Honestly, I think we need a way to start capturing CO2 and that’s a solid solution for holding a large amount of CO2.
Once our CO2 emissions finally come under control and we are not pumping out an insane amount, we will need to start finding ways to capture massive amounts of CO2 and holding them, or chemically changing the CO2 into liquids or solids.