ExxonMobil pushes carbon capture plan in Houston Ship Channel

By Michael McGrady, Maritime Direct Americas & Pacific Correspondent

HOUSTON — Darren W. Woods, the chairperson and chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, and Joe Blommaert, the president of the company’s low carbon solutions business, authored an opinion editorial in the Wall Street Journal explaining to the world that the company plans on working with carbon capture technology on the Houston Ship Channel.

“The heavy-industry area of the Houston Ship Channel on the Gulf Coast of Texas is an ideal location to apply this concept,” writes Woods and Blommaert in the Journal.

“This area houses one of the country’s largest sources of industrial emissions and is close to the Gulf of Mexico’s vast subsurface storage potential, where the CO2 would be permanently stored in the pore space of the rocks, thousands of feet below the seafloor.”

Both executives also add that their push for developing this new technology strategy should be welcomed by the administration of President Joe Biden and supported.

“The Houston CCS Innovation Zone concept would require the “whole of government” approach to the climate challenge that President Biden has championed,” they said. “Based on our experience with projects of this scale, we estimate the approach could generate tens of thousands of new jobs needed to make and install the equipment to capture the CO2 and transport it via a pipeline for storage.”