Publicly available information shows that companies have made few investments inlower-carbon technologies relative to their overall capital expenditures. For example, Chevronspent $1.5 billion in 2023 on lower-carbon technologies, representing only 4% of its total capitalexpenditures plus distributions.146 It has only pledged $10 billion of capital allocation toward“lower carbon” projects by 2028

Oil companies have also treated carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) as a “shiny flashy object,” according to Raskin. Internally though, company employees messaged that CCUS, a process of capturing carbon dioxide and injecting it underground, isn’t viable. A 2016 presentation for BP noted the technology “has stalled and commercial deployment is very limited.”

In 2022, a study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that LaBarge was selling half of its captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery and venting the rest. This means that millions of tonnes of carbon the company claimed to have “captured” were ultimately emitted into the atmosphere.

According to a case study from MIT, where Exxon has long funded research on CCS and other industry-friendly “climate solutions,” from 1986 to 2008, LaBarge reinjected about 400,000 tonnes of CO2 a year back into the reservoir from which it came, and vented 180 million cubic feet of CO2 per day from the facility’s smokestacks. In 2008, it was ordered by the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to reduce its vented CO2 emissions, which it did by building out a carbon capture system that redirected CO2 into pipelines for enhanced oil recovery.

The IRA nominally requires companies to verify their claims to the credit, but aside from some specific requirements to ensure condensed CO2 doesn’t wind up in groundwater, the EPA is not verifying how much carbon is actually sequestered by these projects.“There is no cap on 45Q and stored emissions are entirely self-reported,” Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director of the Science & Environmental Health Network, said.

it now pays up to $85 per metric ton and up to $60 for carbon stored and used for enhanced oil recovery, or EOR. Suddenly, EOR, a technique for getting more oil out of the ground, is a “climate solution” called CCS and CCS is profitable.

Of the rest of the 240 million tonnes of carbon emitted over the facility’s first 35 years in operation, half has been sold to various oilfield operators for enhanced oil recovery— a process by which oil companies inject carbon underground to get more oil out. Approximately 120 million tonnes, meanwhile, has been vented into the atmosphere.

have now asked the Supreme Court to issue an emergency stay on the power plant rules, again arguing that the technology isn’t ready for prime time.

When the Environmental Protection Agency proposed requiring that power plants install CCS in its rules for power plants, for example, both fossil fuel companies and utilities expressed far less faith in the technology in their public comments on the rule than they have in their ads about carbon capture. In Exxon’s public comment, the company encouraged the agency to reduce its requirements around capture efficiency from 95 percent to 75 percent, which is more in line with the actual performance of existing CCS projects.

While Shell’s optimistic projection envisions 10,000 large-scale CCS facilities operational by 2070, with more than 2500 facilities by 2050, Exxon predicts somewhere between 250 and 500 facilities by 2050.

Buried in a chart in that projection is ExxonMobil’s belief at the time about the global potential for CCS.

That hasn’t stopped major oil companies from claiming that carbon capture and storage “will be essential for helping society achieve net-zero emissions,” that they are delivering “carbon capture for American industry,” working on reducing emissions in their own businesses (also referred to as “carbon intensity”), and delivering “heavy industry with low emissions.” But internal documents obtained during the federal investigation, as well as information that industry whistleblowers shared with Drilled and Vox, reveal an industry that is decidedly more realistic about the emissions-reduction potential of carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, than it presents publicly.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said carbon capture might be necessary to reduce the emissions of certain “hard to abate” sectors like steel, concrete, and some chemical manufacturing, but noted that in the best-case scenario, with carbon capture technology working flawlessly and deployed at large scale, it could only account for a little over 2 percent of global carbon emissions reductions by 2030.

But there was at least one notable exception: a report detailing the company’s projections for the future of carbon capture technology.

but also were continuing to misinform them about the industry’s preferred climate “solutions”— particularly biofuels and carbon capture.

hould be assessed in the global stocktaking process of the UNFCCC