Occidental Petroleum is investing in billion-dollar projects to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. The effort is raising hopes — and eyebrows
By Daniel Estrin, Camila Domonoske
3-Minute Listen / Transcript available
Quote:
So Occidental Petroleum, a big American oil company, they are really good at a kind of oil production that involves injecting CO2 underground to squeeze more oil out of old wells. So when they heard about this technology to pull carbon out of the sky, they thought, wait; this could work for us. They plan to put some carbon underground just to store it.
This is worse than a zero sum game. Every litre of oil produces multiple litres of CO2 gas.
Sorry, but not that uplifting at all.
Don’t forget this gem
But they also plan to use some of that carbon to make more oil
This shit is just an excuse for more oil, they ain’t even tryna hide it
Technically, it’s uplifting if you are a deposit of oil.
Doesn’t that mean that the oil produced here emits less net CO2? Since CO2 was used to extract it, taking it out of the atmosphere, that mean that the entire process of extraction and consumption emits less net CO2 than more traditional methods.
Hardly carbon neutral, but an improvement.
