Executives with Occidental Petroleum Corp., Houston, have signed an agreement with their peers at timberlands titan Weyerhauser Co. that gives Occidental’s Oxy Low Carbon Ventures division the right to build and operate a carbon sequestration hub under Louisiana land owned by Weyerhauser.
Per the deal, Occidental will evaluate the prospects for a carbon capture operation that would permanently house industrial carbon dioxide in geologic formations under more than 30,000 acres controlled by Weyerhauser and not associated with oil and gas production. Seattle-based Weyerhauser will continue to manage the above-ground land in Livingston Parish, east of Baton Rouge, as a working forest.
Occidental executives have voiced their ambition to build a business that not only manages, stores and/or repurposes the company’s own emissions but also provides a platform for other emitters—such as factories or power plants—to capture and remove theirs. Noting that they are developing better processes and more efficient technologies while several large companies are adopting emission-reduction policies and various policy makers around the world are incentivizing the transition, they see a big market taking shape with solid economic underpinnings.
“The next few years will be critical to help determine the ultimate pace of deployment,” Richard Jackson, chairman of OLCV’s 1PointFive unit, said at a company presentation to analysts last week. “We’ll be prepared to deliver.”
For more information on Occidental’s ambitious plans, visit our sister brand Oil & Gas Journal.
About the author: A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.
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