ExxonMobil becomes Founding Member of the Global Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) Institute

Next generation technology can help secure our energy and environmental future.


16 April 2009

MELBOURNE – ExxonMobil subsidiary, ExxonMobil Australia, announced today that it had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Australian Government to become a Founding Member of the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.

"As a world leader in carbon management technologies, with a deep base of technical knowledge and applied experience, we look forward to working with the Institute to advance carbon capture and storage in Australia and around the globe," Mr. Mark Nolan, Chairman of ExxonMobil Australia, said.

“With nearly 60 percent of global fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions coming from power-generation, carbon capture and storage applied to such facilities offers the promise of significantly reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.”

ExxonMobil’s Vice-President of Environmental Policy and Planning, Ms. Sherri Stuewer also welcomed the initiative, saying that ExxonMobil was pleased to collaborate with the newly formed Institute.

“ExxonMobil is currently involved in many of the world’s leading projects involving carbon capture and storage technologies. From the oil and gas fields of Sleipner in Norway, to LaBarge in Wyoming, to the Gorgon Fields of Western Australia, ExxonMobil engineers and scientists are working on leading edge technologies that could help make CCS available and affordable on a global scale,” Ms. Stuewer said.

“The world faces an enormous challenge in meeting rising energy demand while reducing emissions. An innovative and integrated set of solutions will be needed to meet this challenge, including producing hydrocarbons more effectively, using them more efficiently, improving existing alternatives and developing new technology,” she said.

While the oil and gas industry has been undertaking all of the elements of CCS for over three decades, there remain significant challenges in the commercial application and wide-scale deployment of CCS technologies, particularly in their application to capturing CO2 from large coal-fired power and large industrial combustible sources.

"ExxonMobil believes that the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute can play an important role in helping to overcome the commercial, regulatory and technical barriers to wide-scale deployment of CCS demonstration projects. It is also an important step in meeting our shared goal of reducing emissions while supplying the energy the world needs for economic growth and prosperity," Mr. Nolan said.

Carbon capture and storage is a process whereby CO2 is captured and separated from gas streams in industrial processes then compressed and transported to a location where it is permanently stored deep underground.

ExxonMobil and CCS

ExxonMobil has researched, developed, and applied carbon-handling technologies for more than 30 years. All of the important components of the CCS process (capture, transport and storage) are practiced commercially today at industrial scale in the handling of produced oil and gas by ExxonMobil. For example, ExxonMobil has been involved with CCS in the North Sea Sleipner gas field where over 10 million tons of CO2 have been sequestered since 1998. In Australia, ExxonMobil with its co-venturers in the Gorgon Project is pursuing the largest commercial scale CCS project in the world. The Gorgon CCS proposal represents the biggest single investment to date contemplated purely for the management of greenhouse gas emissions.

The company also supports a range of carbon capture and storage research initiatives through Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) and other academic institutions, and is also undertaking in-house, proprietary R&D. As one example, the company has committed more than $100 million to complete development and testing of an improved natural gas treating technology known as Controlled Freeze Zone (CFZ), which could make carbon capture and storage more affordable and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. ExxonMobil is building a commercial CFZ demonstration plant near LaBarge, Wyoming, which is expected to be operational in late 2009. ExxonMobil is also working with the European Commission and other companies on the CO2ReMoVe project to evaluate a range of carbon injection and storage technologies in Norway, Algeria and Germany.


Media contact: Gemma Allman, Senior Public Affairs Adviser: +61 3 9270 3537 or +61 408 971 708.