The necessity to reduce carbon emissions and arrest its deleterious impact on the health of the planet is one of the main drivers of the "energy transition."
Energy transition is a term that is used differently by different people, said Eric Oswald, vice president of strategy development and advocacy for ExxonMobil's Low Carbon Solutions business.
"A lot of markets are talking about greenhouse gas emissions," Oswald noted. The Houston marketplace, he said, is "interested in greenhouse gas emissions, but we're also interested in helping Houston win the energy transition."
A Houston-based carbon capture and storage (CCS) hub would propel Houston to win that transition, he said.
Industry, government and science are recognizing the urgency of responding to the growing threat of climate change and the impact of CO2 emissions on the planet, and CCS is one possible solution that illustrates particularly bold progress.
CCS involves capturing CO2 from industrial activity that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. Once captured, the carbon is then injected into deep underground geological formations for safe, permanent storage.
"What I think is really exciting is that Houston is poised to take over leadership of CCS [implementation]," Oswald said.
According to Oswald, the area around the Houston Ship Channel is "perfectly suited" for a CCS hub project.
"You've got an enormous amount of sources relatively close together, and they're extremely close to a world-class sequestration area in the offshore, so you don't have very much distance from where the emissions are to where the sequestration is, which keeps the cost down significantly," he said.
Explaining the basic functions of the hub, Oswald said that CO2 would flow via pipeline from power generators, manufacturers, refineries and chemical plants to the hub, an underground storage reservoir thousands of feet below sea level, located in the Gulf of Mexico. There, the CO2 is capped by an impermeable rock that seals it in safely, securely and permanently.
The project envisions approximately 100 million metric tons of CO2 being captured per year, Oswald said. A project of that scale requires the cooperation and collaboration of industry, government and the at-large community.
Benefits of the hub include improved air quality, additional jobs and economic impact, and will position Houston as the leader in the world's lower carbon energy future, Oswald said.
The potential employment boost brought by the CCS hub would be "enormous," he added.
"We conservatively estimate many tens of thousands of jobs to execute the full sequestration project in the Greater Houston area," he said.
The National Petroleum Council (NPC) backs up Oswald's estimates.
"The NPC has estimated that jobs associated with CCS investment in the U.S. could grow from about 10,000 per year to more than 200,000 per year by 2050," Oswald said.
