MOSCOW (MRC) -- ExxonMobil on Wednesday offered to lease 500,000 acres off the Texas coast, securing space for what could become a massive project to capture and store carbon emissions, according to Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Under pressure by investors to address climate change, Exxon in April floated an up to USD100 B industry hub to collect planet-warming emissions from Gulf Coast petrochemical plants and bury them under the Gulf of Mexico.
Wednesday's nearly USD15 MM in bids are "potentially the first time federal Gulf of Mexico acreage has been leased for purposes other than the extraction" of oil and gas, said Rystad Energy oil analyst Colin White.
The company's bidding in US Department of Interior auction "takes a long-term business view," spokesperson Todd Spitler said. Exxon will evaluate the acreage seismic and subsurface geology once final awards are determined, he said.
Spitler declined to comment on the acreage's carbon capture potential. Exxon has said it will spend USD15 B on lower-carbon technologies over the next six years. It plans to disclose new details of emissions reduction and project spending in two weeks, it said in a filing.
The top US oil company has been selling its Gulf of Mexico oil properties since 2018, putting investments into more lucrative fields off Guyana, Brazil and in US shale.
In addition to the US carbon capture hub, it has recently reached preliminary agreements with Singapore and Malaysia to explore projects. Exxon snapped up 94 offshore blocks, containing 541,000 acres (219,000 hectares), the largest of any bidder and nearly a third of the tracts receiving bids.
As MRC reported before, ExxonMobil said earlier this month it is on track to meet its 2025 emissions reduction targets by the end of this year - four years earlier than planned - and has vowed to ramp up investments to further cut emissions.
We remind that ExxonMobil plans to build its first, large-scale plastic waste advanced recycling facility in Baytown, Texas, and is expected to start operations by year-end 2022. By recycling plastic waste back into raw materials that can be used to make plastic and other valuable products, the technology could help address the challenge of plastic waste in the environment. A smaller, temporary facility, is already operational and producing commercial volumes of certified circular polymers that will be marketed by the end of this year to meet growing demand.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,868,160 tonnes in the first nine months of 2021, up by 18% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 1,138,510 tonnes in January-September 2021, up by 30% year on year. Supply of propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas supply of injection moulding statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) decreased significantly.
MRC