In 2022, the House Oversight Committee Democrats subpoenaed documents from four oil majors—BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell—as part of an investigation into fossil fuel-funded disinformation on climate change. When Republicans took over the House, Senate Democrats got involved and it became a bicameral investigation culminating in a report, released April 30th, a joint hearing, held May 1st, and a formal request from Senator Whitehouse and Representative Raskin on May 22nd that the Department of Justice open an investigation into what they described as “Big Oil’s decades-long disinformation campaign to mislead the public about the climate effects of fossil fuels and obstruct climate action.”
In their report and at the hearing, government investigators noted that the oil companies had “obstructed” their investigation, submitting scarcely any documents, redacting what they did send, and withholding large segments of others for “privilege.” One Exxon employee who spoke with Drilled under condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation described what the company sent as “a truly random assortment of unimportant documents.”
There was at least one exception. Exxon’s marketing (the May 7 NYT “Deal Book” ad below, for example) claims that it is “capturing carbon for American industry,” working on reducing emissions in its own business, and delivering "heavy industry with low emissions.” But internal documents obtained in the subpoena reveal a company that is decidedly less optimistic about the future of CCS.
In 2018, Shell released an updated energy scenario for 2070 in which it laid out a “radical” new approach on climate. Shell pioneered the now-common practice of “scenario planning” for oil majors: mapping out what the industry and the world are likely to look like in the future. It still generally puts its scenario plan out first, and other oil majors will often compare their scenarios to Shell’s. Exxon’s internal 2018 scenario comparison was included in the most recent batch of documents handed over to Senate and House investigators. In it, ExxonMobil compared its future projections with Shell's rosiest forecast. Hidden in a chart in the projection is ExxonMobil’s belief about the global potential for CCS.
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While Shell’s optimistic projection envisions 10,000 large-scale CCS facilities operational by 2070, with more than 2500 facilities by 2050, Exxon predicts somewhere between 250 and 500 facilities by 2050, according to the (admittedly difficult-to-read) graph. Elsewhere in the scenario it also envisions that “global scale is limited” for CCS and hydrogen tech by 2050.
These projections are much more in line with what critics of CCS have been saying for years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, has said that even if realized at its full announced potential, CCS would only account for about 2.4% of the world’s carbon mitigation by 2030. In its fact sheet on CCS, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) states: “It’s worth noting that not one single CCS project has ever reached its target CO2 capture rate.”
David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis for IEEFA, says fossil fuel companies and utilities both expressed their concern about the limits of CCS technology in their public comments in response to the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules for power plants. Exxon, for example, encouraged the agency to reduce capture efficiency to 75 percent from the 95 percent the industry promises in much of its marketing and lobbying.
“Last year, when the first EPA power plant rule was released, it was going to mandate either using CCS on a power plant in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to take some action that would be equivalent to adding CCS, and the response from industry was ‘hey the tech is really not proven,’” he said. “Many, many comments from oil companies and utilities, in response to both the initial EPA rule and the current one, were saying this tech really doesn’t work.”
Exxon’s low internal projections for CCS map to the company’s own experience with the technology. To date, the only “successful” carbon capture project Exxon points to in its materials is its LaBarge Shute Creek gas facility in Wyoming, where only 3 percent of the carbon captured has been sequestered underground. Of the rest, half has been sold for enhanced oil recovery—injecting carbon underground to get more oil out—and the other half has been vented into the atmosphere.
What these projections don’t match at all, however, are Exxon’s ads promoting CCS as a climate solution. An NPR sponsorship from 2018, for example, describes ExxonMobil as “the company that believes that carbon capture technologies are critical for lowering global CO2 emissions.” Emails obtained by the bicameral investigation show that Exxon threw itself into promoting the technology and positioning itself as a leader in its development. In the last five years, Exxon produced multiple pro-CCS brochures and ads, comparing the carbon capture potential at industrial plants to the carbon sequestration of actual plants and trees. The oil major even worked on a series of kids’ videos touting CCS. In one subpoenaed email, Exxon executives asked the creative team working on the kids’ series to steer away from the idea that carbon is bad or that carbon capture is difficult. “De-emphasize concept that catching carbon is difficult or hard,” the feedback reads.
Yet that is precisely the company’s experience with CCS, according to several current and former Exxon staffers who agreed to speak with Drilled on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Some of them were involved in the early days of researching CCS as a potential climate solution at Exxon, which they said only began in earnest in 2018.
The company’s experience before then, the sources said, was entirely focused on enhanced oil recovery—the process of injecting CO2 into a separate well (an injection well) to increase enough pressure in a reservoir to push additional oil out of a production well. While enhanced oil recovery, or EOR, does sequester carbon—some of it stays underground after it's been injected—it also produces oil that ultimately generates more CO2 emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, using naturally occurring carbon, as opposed to CO2 captured from a facility like a power plant or manufacturing facility, “clearly provides no benefit in terms of emissions intensity.”
In the United States, more than 70 percent of the CO2 injected underground as part of the EOR process is from natural sources. That’s true of the LaBarge facility as well, where the CO2 source is not the liquefaction plant, but the gas that’s being drilled. In other words, absent the gas project, there would be no CO2 emissions in the first place.
Despite that, when ExxonMobil talks about itself as the “global leader” in CCS, pointing to its “more than 30 years of CCS experience,” the company is referring to LaBarge, which has been in operation since 1986. According to a case study from MIT, where Exxon has long funded research on CCS and other industry-friendly “climate solutions,” from 1986 to 2008, LaBarge reinjected about 400,000 tonnes of CO2 a year back into the reservoir from which it came, and vented 180 million cubic feet of CO2 per day from the facility’s smokestacks. In 2008, it was ordered by the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to reduce its vented CO2 emissions, which it did by building out a carbon capture system that redirected CO2 into pipelines for enhanced oil recovery. In 2022, a study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that LaBarge was selling half of its captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery and venting the rest.
Climate scientists say CCS connected to fossil fuel use or production delivers little benefit when it comes to tackling climate change, period.
“CCS makes sense for hard-to-abate sectors like concrete, steel, and certain chemicals and fertilizers, where you’re capturing carbon at the facility level,” said David Ho, professor at University of Hawaii and senior researcher at Columbia University. “It doesn’t make sense to use CCS to prolong our use of fossil fuels, especially to produce electricity. The argument in favor of enhanced oil recovery is often that if they weren’t using this captured CO2 they’d be using some other CO2, but I don’t think you can call anything where you’re getting more oil out of the ground to burn a climate solution.”
Yet, so far, oil majors have struggled to deploy CCS technology in any other capacity. “When we talk about the failure of CCS, we generally talk about capturing not storage, but when you look at capacity and how much has actually been sequestered, it’s very little,” Ho said. When CO2 is actually sequestered underground, there’s no guarantee it stays there. “It’s difficult to monitor CO2 once it’s injected into a reservoir underground. Half of it could leak out,” Ho said.
According to current and former Exxon employees, the company’s efforts to explore the “S” part of the CCS equation—storage, or sequestration—only began when it pulled together a team of technical experts to look for weaknesses in a 2018 U.S. Geological Survey assessment that showed enormous potential for CCS.
“They thought the USGS was overly optimistic [about the potential of CCS] and they wanted us to basically bring industry technical expertise in to tell them their projections were overblown,” one Exxon staffer said. The team brought together to study CCS was then tasked with running an experiment to see if it was even possible to permanently store captured carbon. When the study showed that it was indeed possible, current and former Exxon staffers told Drilled the company’s executives were “surprised.”
In short order, both the International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with reports saying CCS was probably going to be necessary to keep warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. The IPCC had put out its most alarming report ever, youth climate strikes were dominating headlines all over the world, and despite a very supportive regulatory environment at home in the U.S., globally the industry was on its back foot. It was as good a time as any for Exxon to position itself as a leader on carbon capture.
In addition to its ad campaigns, Exxon expanded its university investments into carbon capture research, and started building out a list of what one former employee described as “low hanging fruit” CCS projects. These were ventures where “CCS could be implemented quickly, at low cost and we could claim we’re doing it at scale,” that former employee told Drilled.
The company also began touting its 25% stake in another high-profile CCS project, the offshore Gorgon gas field in Australia. In 2019, ExxonMobil proclaimed on its website that CCS at Gorgon would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the project by a whopping 40 percent. To say it never hit that target would be an understatement; Gorgon has been described as a massive failure and a black mark on the credibility of the idea that CCS is a valid technology for addressing greenhouse gas emissions. The project is on track to capture less CO2 every year.
To truly sell CCS as a climate solution, Exxon had to show that storage at scale was feasible. Former employees told Drilled that at the end of the last decade, executives came up with a prioritized list of the company’s export and import terminals and refineries where it might be relatively easy to attach CCS. As of this year, none of those projects have been built (though the company did publicly announce in late 2023 that it was working on a fuel-cell-powered carbon capture and hydrogen project at its Rotterdam refinery, one of the options on that list).
While it hasn’t managed to build commercial scale carbon storage itself, Exxon did acquire enhanced oil recovery company Denbury in 2023, which brought 1300 miles of CO2 pipelines and 15 onshore carbon storage sites under Exxon’s control. Again, this system is focused on enhanced oil recovery, which ultimately leads to more fossil fuels and more emissions. (The industry has been pushing the idea of “carbon-negative” barrels of oil, using the potential of CCS and carbon removal via direct air capture, another technology that has yet to hit scale, as justification for these claims.) Fatiha Biro, executive director of the International Energy Agency, meanwhile, has called the industry’s plan to offset its emissions with carbon capture “fantasy.”
The failure to build carbon storage at scale hasn’t kept Exxon, or the rest of the fossil fuel industry, from lobbying the U.S. government for financial incentives that make it increasingly worthwhile to invest in CCS projects. These incentives include expanding tax credits that unlocked $890 million in Department of Energy funding for carbon capture demonstration projects and $2.5 billion allocated by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for projects that demonstrate commercial-scale carbon capture technologies. They’ve also secured a subsidy for captured carbon through the Inflation Reduction Act in the form of 45Q, which pays companies $85 per metric ton of carbon captured and stored, and $60 per metric ton used in EOR. The industry is already lobbying to increase that price to $100 per metric ton. Technical difficulties also haven’t stopped oil majors, including Exxon, from advertising the as-yet-unrealized benefits of CCS. On May 16, 2024, Exxon published an article on its website about CCS, proclaiming it to be “a versatile climate tool,” and describing it as “a technology that captures CO2, then stores it safely and permanently [emphasis mine] deep underground.”
“It’s one of the only scalable, affordable options available today for energy-intensive industries (like steelmaking) that rely on fossil fuels but want to reduce their post-combustion CO2 emissions,” the article continued. But to date, Exxon has not figured out how to make CCS scalable for itself.
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In its 2018 scenario, ExxonMobil said it was assuming that between 2018 and 2050, “CCS and hydrogen are deployed, but global scale is limited.” It’s hard to tell whether that was a prediction or a plan, but in either case the company is right on track delivering that scenario—despite all the claims in its marketing.
