Houston Republic

A carbon capture and storage (CCS) innovation zone along Houston's Ship Channel and local industrial area could reel in all carbon dioxide emission from the area's petrochemical, manufacturing and power generation facilities, an ExxonMobil vice president said in a recent blog.

The captured CO2 could then be piped into natural geologic formations thousands of feet below the gulf's floor, ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions President Joe Blommaert said in his April 19 blog post, noting Houston is the perfect place for such a concept.

That was enough to generate praise from Gov. Greg Abbott.

"Texas is an energy leader thanks to innovative companies like @exxonmobil who invest in our communities and seek a cleaner future," Abbott said in a Twitter post the same day as Bommaert's blog post.

Houston is a natural to become a CCS innovation zone.

"Houston has two features that make it an ideal site for CCS," Bommaert said. "It has many large industrial emission sources, and it's located near geologic formations in the Gulf of Mexico that could store large amounts of CO2 safely, securely and permanently. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that storage capacity along the U.S. 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."

ExxonMobil has spent the past three years assessing the concept of multi-user CCS "hubs" near geologic storage sites, such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs, Bommaert said.

"We believe the time is right for a large-scale collaboration in the United States between government at every level, private industry, academia and local communities to create an 'Innovation Zone' approach to dramatically accelerate CCS progress," he said.

Such a project would be "huge" and would need the "collective support" of government and industry "with a combined estimated investment of $100 billion or more," Bommaert said.

It would be worth the time, effort and money.

"But the benefits could be equally big: early projections indicate that if the appropriate policies were in place, infrastructure could be built in Houston to safely capture and permanently store about 50 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2030," he said. "By 2040, it could be 100 million metric tons."