Carlyle-Backed Crescent Midstream to Build CCS Project in Louisiana, Ready in 2028

Much like baling out a flooded basement with a spoon or shoveling the driveway in the middle of a snowstorm, carbon-capture projects to date have had minimal impact at best on the bigger goal of reducing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. But an ExxonMobil-led project that’s taking shape in and around Houston could soon set a new mark for the scale at which carbon-capture projects operate. The plan calls for capturing, gathering, compressing and sequestering up to 50 million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) of CO2 by 2030, and up to twice that much by 2040 — enough to start making a real dent in Gulf Coast CO2 emissions. In today’s RBN blog, we take a closer look at the biggest carbon-capture project currently taking shape: ExxonMobil’s proposed Houston CCS Innovation Zone.

Given all the recent attention, you’d think the prospects for carbon-capture project development are fantastic. In the U.S., last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) featured significant increases in the 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestration, improving the economics for a wide range of carbon-capture projects. On a global level, it seems clear that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and reach a net-zero world will continue for a long time to come. Nearly every plan to reach that target includes a significant reliance on carbon capture, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasting that 7,600 million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) of carbon dioxide (CO2) — that’s 7.6 gigatons per year — will need to be captured and sequestered by 2050. We are a long way from those levels, given that most estimates put global carbon-capture capacity at a little more than 40 MMtpa today, or less than 1% of what the EIA thinks we’ll need in less than 27 years. In today’s RBN blog, we look at the main factors holding back the wider commercialization of carbon-capture initiatives in the U.S.

Not long ago, many considered large-scale industrial carbon capture to be a pie-in-the-sky concept. But neither the capturing of carbon dioxide (CO2) nor permanent underground sequestration is new — naturally occurring sources of CO2 have been used in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) for decades. And, with new financial incentives and a renewed sense of urgency regarding climate action, things are changing fast — so quickly, in fact, that the carbon-capture industry may be poised for exponential growth, both in the U.S. and abroad. In the encore edition of today’s RBN blog, we discuss highlights from our second Drill Down Report on carbon capture.