ExxonMobil

May 26th was a difficult day for big oil. Three major setbacks for the industry occurred on the same day.

A Dutch court ruled in a case against Shell, ordering the company to cut emissions by 2030 in accordance with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. The case was brought by climate activists, ultimately comprising 17,000 co-plaintiffs. The ruling will probably be appealed but it does represent a major precedent for holding polluters accountable for their actions.

That same day, shareholders of ExxonMobil replaced at least two of the company’s board members with candidates dedicated to decarbonizing the company. Having two board seats filled by climate supporters is not likely to radically transform the company, but it is a powerful rebuke of Exxon’s iconic business model of “drill, baby, drill”.

Finally, Chevron’s shareholder meeting on May 26th saw 61% of shareholders voting for the company to reduce its so-called Scope 3 emissions, meaning the pollution from all the fossil fuels it sells. In addition, 48% of shareholders voted to demand a report on Chevron’s dark money lobbying. That initiative did not carry, but nevertheless, nearly half of the company’s shareholders expressed concern about how Chevron is corrupting the political process in order to achieve its ends.

These events are examples of mainstream activism where the pressure on fossil fuel companies is not just coming from the usual environmental activists but rather from shareholders, who after all actually own the companies. The fossil fuel industry still wields enormous power, but it appears increasingly possible to challenge it and even to win.

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A landmark day in the fight against fossil fuels

Photo, posted August 15, 2014, courtesy of Mike Mozart via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Carbon dioxide emissions by electricity generating plants, fossil-fuel burning vehicles, and industry produce about 2/3 of the greenhouse gases driving climate change. Without decreasing these emissions, the earth will continue to get warmer, sea levels will continue to rise, and the world will face more droughts, floods, wildfires, famine and conflict.

Electrification of vehicles and reliance upon renewable energy sources will ultimately drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels and the resultant emissions, but that transition may take too long to reverse the direction of climate change. In the meantime, there is a great need to find effective and efficient ways to capture emissions from fossil fuel plants.

Recent research at the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and ExxonMobil has developed a new technique for carbon capture. The technique makes use of metal-organic framework (or MOF) technology. An MOF, modified with nitrogen-containing amine molecules, captures CO2 and then low-temperature steam is used to flush out the CO2 either to be used or sequestered underground.

Experiments demonstrated the technique to have a six-times greater capacity for removing CO2 from the flue gas of a refinery than current amine-based technology. It selectively removed 90% of the emitted CO2.

There is a relatively limited market for captured CO2, so power plants using the capture technology would likely pump the CO2 into the ground, or otherwise sequester it. The cost of doing this sort of emission scrubbing would have to be facilitated by government policies, such as carbon trading or a carbon tax, which would provide the necessary economic incentive for doing carbon capture and sequestration.

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New technique to capture CO2 could reduce power plant greenhouse gases

Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

A Tough Day For Big Oil | Earth Wise

May 26th was a difficult day for big oil. Three major setbacks for the industry occurred on the same day.

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A New Carbon Capture Technique | Earth Wise

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