The CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, wants you to know that his company is very serious about fitting itself into President Biden’s “whole of government” approach to climate change, writing in the Wall Street Journal that “ExxonMobil is eager to play our part to advance” carbon capture and sequestration.
“For the past three years” Woods and his co-author Joe Blommaert, president of “ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions,” write, they “have been studying the concept of creating multiuser CCS ‘hubs’ in industrial areas'' like Houston, Texas, making the claim that these “CCS Innovation Zones would bring together government incentives and private-sector investment.”
While on its face, if you woke up on Monday with no knowledge of ExxonMobil’s decades of deception, that might sound like a great offer. Carbon capture will be needed to bring CO2 levels back down to pre-industrial levels, after all.
But the problems with this claim are legion, starting with the fact that CCS is hardly as proven to reduce emissions as not burning fossil fuels in the first place and using renewables instead. It has also already failed to live up to expectations, as the only CCS plant in the US closed in February.
Then consider the scale - Woods and Blommaert mention the Gulf Coast’s potential capacity to capture 500 billion metric tons of CO2, and the (expensive, experimental, taxpayer funded) Houston Hub another 100 million metric tons.
But what about the other 100 million metric tons ExxonMobil pollutes every year? Its 2019, Scope 3 emissions (pollution from its value chain) were equivalent to 730 million metric tons. So even ExxonMobil’s unproven, very-hyped, pie in the sky, hail-mary lifeline bailout to the fossil fuel industry proposal ... is still vastly insufficient to address even its own emissions in a single year.
In the three years ExxonMobil spent studying this idea, it’s emitted more than three times as much carbon pollution as the supposed solution could store. And we’re supposed to take them seriously as good-faith partners in the effort to fight climate change?
Those fun facts and more were in a report on ExxonMobil’s greenwashing. This report also found that ExxonMobil is planning to spend some $20-25 billion on capital and fossil fuel exploration, but the algae and other clean energy stuff they advertise about gets just 0.2% of that money.
ExxonMobil’s hardly the only oil company behaving badly though. Take Devon Energy, the Oklahoma oil and gas company that you may remember for being so cozy with Republican Attorneys General like pre-Trump Scott Pruitt that they were writing letters that those politicians would sign as their own.
Well, Devon is back in the news, and not for a better reason. In 2020 it received $220 million from the COVID-19 stimulus payments meant to protect business from having to lay off workers. Of course, Devon gave shareholders $257 million in dividends, and cut 400 jobs (about 22% of its workforce), according to the newest report from Bailout Watch.
While a stand-out, “Devon is not alone in diversity taxpayer bailouts to its shareholders while laying workers off.” According to the Bailout Watch analysis of the 15 oil and gas companies that got over $100 million in a CARES Act tax loophole, “more than half increased spending on the dividends paid to their shareholders — and all but two shed jobs.”
Reiterating that, as Kate Aronoff wrote earlier this month, fossil fuel companies are the real job killers.