Groundbreaking ceremony was held Friday for Stratos, Occidental Petroleum’s first direct air carbon capture facility in west Texas. It’s one of five in industrial areas of Texas and Louisiana for Oxy and its affiliate, 1PointFive, who plan to build 100 DAC facilities worldwide by 2035 in its transition from a Houston-based oil giant to a carbon management company. “It’s an ambitious challenge,” Oxy president and CEO Vicki Hollub told 230 people at the ceremony, “but one that is well suited to our skills and enables us to make a difference in reducing emissions.” Richard Jackson, president of U.S. onshore resources and carbon management for Oxy, said the company is the largest handler of CO2 in the world.
The 65-acre site is 35 miles west of Odessa near the small community of Notrees in Ector County. The $1 billion plant will initially capture up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year with the capability of scaling up to one million metric tons per year. Startup is scheduled for 2025. Other Texas locations of DAC plants include a 55,000-acre site in Chambers, Jefferson and Liberty counties along the Gulf Coast and a 100,000-acre site south of Corpus Christi.
Hollub added, “We know that achieving world net zero by 2050 requires Oxy and others to reduce emissions with direct air capture.” She said Oxy started looking at ways to improve the environment 10 years ago. “We had the groundbreaking tools we needed to do something extraordinary and make a difference around the world.” Sight prep work, including construction of 13 miles of roads, was completed before groundbreaking for the plant began.
Carbon capture is NOT good for the environment. Plants and trees use CO2 to grow, producing sugars
to their cells and respiring (exhaling) OXYGEN for humans to breathe. Seems ‘environmentalists’ are
trying to starve us of oxygen as well as food.
westtxlawrence
Instead of carbon capture, Oxy and the other oil and gas producers of Texas should get together
with the electrical generation companies and use electrolysis to turn produced water into hydrogen and oxygen gas, compress and liquify it into liquid oxygen and hydrogen…..burn that
in electrical generation so the exhaust would be pure water, and supply the liquid oxygen and hydrogen to the transportation industry so trucks and cars burning LOX and Hydrogen would
exhaust pure water vapor that does not harm the environment.
Then ALL the products of oil and gas wells would be profitable and not a liability with produced
water disposal costs.
I’ve got over 50 years experience in the oil and gas industry of the Permian and Delaware
basins…..and I’ve NEVER seen the oil companies think anything through and do the smart
thing for the future.
westtxlawrence