MOSCOW (MRC) -- Eleven companies have expressed interest in supporting the large-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology in Houston, according to Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Calpine, Chevron, Dow, ExxonMobil, INEOS, Linde, LyondellBasell, Marathon Petroleum, NRG Energy, Phillips 66 and Valero have agreed to begin discussing plans that could lead to capturing and safely storing up to 50 million metric tons of CO2 per year by 2030 and about 100 million metric tons by 2040.
The companies plan to help address industrial CO2 emissions in one of the largest concentrated sources in the United States. Collectively, the 11 companies are considering using CCS technology at facilities that generate electricity and manufacture products that society uses every day, such as plastics, motor fuels and packaging.
If CCS technology is fully implemented at the Houston-area facilities these 11 companies operate, nearly 75 million metric tons of CO2 could be captured and stored per year by 2040. There are ongoing discussions with other companies that have industrial operations in the area to add even more CO2 capture capacity. They could announce their support at a later date and add further momentum toward the city of Houston’s ambitions to be carbon neutral by 2050.
“Houston can achieve our net zero goals by working together, and it’s exciting to see so many companies have already come together to talk about making Houston the world leader in carbon capture and storage,” said Sylvester Turner, Mayor of Houston. “We’re reimagining what it means to be the energy capital of the world, and applying proven technology to reduce emissions is one of the best ways to get started.”
CCS is the process of capturing CO2 from industrial activity that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere and injecting it into deep underground geologic formations for safe, secure and permanent storage. With supportive regulations, CO2 from the Houston industrial area could be safely stored in the U.S. Gulf Coast region in formations thousands of feet below the surface or seabed. The US Department of Energy estimates that storage capacity along the US Gulf Coast is enough to hold 500 billion metric tons of CO2 - more than 130 years of the country’s total industrial and power generation emissions, based on 2018 data.
Although renewables will continue to play an important role in a lower-carbon energy future, CCS is one of the few proven technologies that could enable some industry sectors to decarbonize, such as manufacturing and heavy industry. The International Energy Agency projects CCS could mitigate up to 15% of global emissions by 2040, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates global decarbonization efforts could be twice as costly without CCS.
As MRC wrote before, Chevron U.S.A. Inc., through its Chevron New Energies division, and a subsidiary of Enterprise Products Partners L.P. have just announced a framework to study and evaluate opportunities for carbon dioxide (CO2) capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) from their respective business operations in the US Midcontinent and Gulf Coast. The companies expect the initial phase of the study in which they will evaluate specific business opportunities to last about six months.
We remind that Chevron Phillips Chemical, a joint venture of Phillips 66 and Chevron, will make a final investment decision on a new cracker in far southeast Texas in 2022, followed by an FID in 2023 on an USD8 billion joint venture petrochemical complex along the US Gulf Coast in 2023.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,176,860 tonnes in the first half of 2021, up by 5% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) decreased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 727,160 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, up by 31% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased. Supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
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