World - Commentary: How Carbon Capture and Storage Projects Are Driving New Oil and Gas Extraction Globally
The oil industry’s push to portray carbon capture as a climate solution at COP28 obscures how the technology is really being used.
When Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber opens the 28th annual UN climate conference in Dubai in November, he will be juggling two roles – convincing the world of the United Arab Emirates’ leadership in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while preserving the very industry that’s causing them.
In addition to his job as summit president, Al Jaber heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), which plans to increase its oil and gas output by 11 percent by 2027. The company says that more oil will mean less emissions, however — provided the industry builds enough facilities to capture carbon dioxide (CO2), the main gas causing the climate crisis.
“We must be laser-focused on phasing out fossil fuel emissions, while phasing up viable, affordable zero carbon alternatives,” Al-Jaber said at a pre-COP 28 event in Bonn in June. The statement was widely interpreted as a pitch for carbon capture.
On September 6, ADNOC finalized a deal to build a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in the UAE’s Habshan oil and gas field, extending the company’s existing CCS operations at a steel plant. Now projected to become one of the largest carbon capture plants in the Middle East, ADNOC says the facility will have the equivalent climate impact of removing 500,000 cars from the road.
In fact, the project will be used to squeeze even more oil from the ground. Most of the CO2 ADNOC already captures is pumped into existing oil wells, forcing residual crude to the surface in a process known as “enhanced oil recovery” or “EOR”.
It is a trend reflected across the sector: Of the 32 commercial CCS facilities operating worldwide, 22 use most, or all, of their captured CO2 to push more oil out of already tapped reservoirs. This fleet accounts for approximately 31 million tonnes of the world’s roughly 42 million tonnes of operational carbon capture capacity, according to figures published by the industry-backed Global CCS Institute, U.S. Energy Information Administration and other sources.
But the fact that existing carbon capture projects are mostly used to bring more oil to the surface has not stopped oil and gas companies championing the technology as a climate solution in the run-up to COP28.
In January, ExxonMobil Tweeted a video interview with a safety and environment supervisor at its LaBarge CCS project in Wyoming.
“Welcome to La Barge — the industrial facility that has captured the most CO2 emissions on earth to date,” says a caption at the start of the clip.
Nowhere does the video mention that most of the CO2 captured from the LaBarge gas processing plant is being injected underground to extract more oil. Research by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit energy think tank, shows that 97 percent of CO2 captured by the La Barge facility has been sold for EOR since the plant began operations in 1986. In times when EOR was not profitable, CO2 was simply vented into the atmosphere.
