I see the word "Oxy" and I think OxyContin, the highly-addictive controversial painkiller that has caused so much hurt for so many.
Why wouldn't I? "Oxy" is, after all, the drug's street name
Imagine my surprise, then, when I tuned into a League Championship Series baseball game between the Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros and saw "OXY" emblazoned on the left sleeve of every Astro.
Surely it couldn't be drug they were touting. A little research confirmed that. "OXY" is also the nickname of Occidental Petroleum, a corporate sponsor of the Astros .
OK, a fossil fuel producer, though not exactly presenting a field-of-dreams kind of image, is better than a drug pusher. Still the "OXY" patches are bad optics, especially for a team most known these days for the cheating debacle of 2017-18.
Exxon Mobil said Thursday it was joining a global corporate coalition working toward the goals of the Paris climate change agreement, the boldest move yet by the oil giant that has faced criticism for past attempts to cast doubts about climate change.
The Irving-based company is one of the newest members of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, described as a "CEO-led initiative which aims to lead the industry response to climate change."
Houston-based Occidental Petroleum and San Ramon, Calif.-based Chevron also announced their memberships on Thursday. Founded in 2014, the coalition now includes 13 of the largest oil and natural gas companies representing 30 percent of the world's oil and natural gas production.
Until now, the group did not include any firms based in the U.S., currently estimated to be the world's largest producer of crude oil.
The importance of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative is heightened since these are the companies responsible for a large percentage of world's greenhouse gas emissions.
Fossil fuel combustion accounts for nearly 94 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Oil and natural gas production, as well as abandoned wells, contribute nearly one-third of U.S. methane emissions.
The nonprofit CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, calculated that 25 companies are responsible for 51 percent of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. Nine of those companies are now part of this global coalition.
Besides focusing on member contributions to climate change, the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative created a $1 billion fund to invest in technologies that could reduce emissions. So far, the fund has targeted companies that could make fossil fuel use less polluting or offset emissions, rather than replacing traditional fuels.
Occidental's 1PointFive secures funding of up to $500 mln from US DOE. (Reuters)
Excerpt from this story from Reuters:
Occidental Petroleum's carbon capture and sequestration unit 1PointFive said on Thursday that the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations has committed up to $500 million to support the development of its South Texas Direct Air Capture (DAC) Hub.
Occidental's first large-scale DAC facility represents a pivotal economic trial for a technology that the International Energy Agency says will play a key role for global industrial decarbonization, despite its high costs in initial tests.
The total award value from the OCED for the facility could be raised to $650 million for the development of an expanded regional carbon network in South Texas, according to a release from Occidental.
The hub's initial carbon dioxide removal capacity of 500,000 metric tons per year could be expanded to over one million metric tons per year, Occidental added.
Earlier this year, 1PointFive also said it would sell carbon credits to companies such as AT&T and Microsoft.
Warren Buffett aumentó su participación en Occidental Petroleum por encima de 25%
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. de Warren Buffett aumentó su participación en Occidental Petroleum Corp. ampliando una racha de compras de dos años que ahora eleva su participación a 25,1%.
Berkshire compró 2,1 millones de acciones por US$122 millones en una serie de compras realizadas entre el 26 y el 28 de junio, según los registros reguladores. Durante gran parte del año pasado, el vehículo de…
Occidental down in premarket as Buffett downplays takeover rumors
Shares of Occidental Petroleum (NYSE: OXY) are down over 1% in premarket trading Monday after Warren Buffett said on May 6 that Berkshire Hathaway does not plan to take full control of the US oil giant.
With today’s drop in the premarket, Occidental’s stock price fell around 3% year-to-date. The company stood at $60.26 per share at press time, down around 0.7% from the Friday close of $60.69 per…
Oil giant says its billion-dollar bid to capture greenhouse gas will give it leeway to invest in fossil fuels
Excerpt from this story from the Wall Street Journal:
About fifty miles southwest of Midland, Texas, deep in the oil-saturated Permian Basin, more than 100 workers are busy laying out roads and water lines, preparing to build an elaborate complex of fans, each as large as a tennis court.
When they start running in 2024, the fans will suck massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air. The carbon will be funneled thousands of feet down deep wells into geological formations, where it should remain for centuries.
The company behind this environmental moonshot is Occidental Petroleum Corp., one of the country’s most successful oil-and-gas producers. It hopes the enterprise will give it license to keep operating as a driller decades into the future.
It is spending more than $1 billion to build the first in a planned fleet of plants using direct-air capture to pull the CO2 out of the air, a budding technology with fuzzy economics. Bolstering the move are generous tax incentives included in the climate package President Biden signed into law last year that cover up to 45% of Occidental’s expected initial costs per metric ton.
Chief Executive Vicki Hollub, who has the blessing of the company’s largest investor, Warren Buffett, said the plan will help it reach net-zero emissions on all its operations, its own energy use and its customers’ use of its products, by 2050, and allow it to keep investing in oil extraction.
Ms. Hollub told investors last year she also expects the clean-energy efforts to eventually become more lucrative than the company’s chemical segment, which manufactures basic chemicals and petroleum-derived products such as vinyls, and is the next-biggest revenue generator after oil and gas. OxyChem’s revenue was $6.7 billion in 2022, roughly 19% of Occidental’s revenue that year, according to the company.
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere at this scale has never been done before, and the enterprise comes with abundant commercial and scientific uncertainties. It is unclear what the appetite for carbon removal will be, how much the service will eventually cost or how massive volumes of buried carbon dioxide will affect the subsurface in the long term.
