ExxonMobil, CF Industries Reach Agreement on CCS Project

A great deal of attention has been heaped on the carbon-capture industry over the past couple of years, from its inclusion in major federal legislation such as 2021’s infrastructure bill and last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, plus all sorts of recently announced carbon sequestration projects. Still, there are plenty of concerns that the technology is not fully baked, that many of the projects are not ready for prime time, and that few have the practical know-how to deploy carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) at scale. But what if there was a company that has been doing carbon sequestration for a very long time — decades in fact? And what if that company has built out a huge carbon dioxide (CO2) collection, distribution and sequestration system on the Gulf Coast along with concrete plans for a massive expansion of this network to capture a lot more manmade, “anthropogenic” CO2, not in decades but in just a few short years? A company like that would be pretty much the ideal acquisition candidate for a cash-flush multinational with big ESG goals and strategies, right? As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, that is just what is happening with ExxonMobil’s acquisition of Denbury, a deal that will create today’s undisputed leader in CCS.

The budget reconciliation bill signed into law July 4 by President Trump — known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) — dramatically scales back a number of clean-energy tax credits and adds a new layer of complexity for some projects, leading to a lot of doom and gloom around clean-energy initiatives, but the new legislation is a big positive for the carbon-capture industry. In today’s RBN blog, we look at how changes to the 45Q tax credit could help advance carbon-capture efforts while also providing a boost to producers of crude oil and blue hydrogen. 

Rising global interest in clean ammonia — plus the potential for earning generous federal tax credits — spurred a host of project announcements over the past couple of years, with the first new production capacity slated to start up as soon as 2025. But reality is setting in regarding the pace of clean-ammonia demand growth and the financial, regulatory and other challenges of developing complicated, big-dollar projects, particularly those involving carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). In today’s RBN blog, we provide an update on the major clean ammonia proposals we’ve been tracking.