Envisioning a lower-carbon future
"Every energy company should strive to become carbon neutral. Addressing climate change is a turning point for the industry."
- Vicki Hollub, Occidental President & CEO
Occidental is committed to advancing the vision for a lower-carbon world. We’re focused on reducing our total carbon impact by decreasing operational emissions, increasing energy efficiency, and capturing and retiring more carbon than our products create—and providing solutions to others looking to do the same.
Our 40 years of experience with carbon management and large-scale carbon separation, transportation, use and storage as part of enhanced oil recovery, make us uniquely capable of realizing our vision through a broad carbon management plan.
We have the largest carbon dioxide (CO2) management operations in the world, storing approximately 20 million tons of CO2 in secure geologic formations annually, while providing robust, transparent measurement of the sequestered carbon. This current position will allow us to offset the emissions equivalent of over 4 million cars with the capture and use of human-made CO2, a greenhouse gas component. As we expand our capacity to capture carbon emissions through partnerships, technology advancements, and project development, we will have the opportunity to retire much more.
For us, low-carbon leadership means going beyond just reducing our own emissions. In 2018, Occidental formed Oxy Low Carbon Ventures to sustainably enhance our business, while providing impactful global emissions reduction solutions. Oxy Low Carbon Ventures focuses on developing carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies to remove human-made carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for use in lower carbon oil production operations and to help create other less carbon-intensive products, including fuels, chemicals, materials and for negative emissions partnerships for hard-to-decarbonize industries. We focus our efforts to offer powerful, practical initiatives that are critical to helping lower emissions across many industries and around the globe.
To complement our CCUS initiatives, we are implementing technologies and projects aimed at increasing energy efficiency. One of the ways we are working on achieving this goal is through partnerships with companies offering viable decarbonization tools for electricity like
NET Power, a natural gas power plant that captures carbon dioxide while generating emissions-free electricity. In 2019, we completed a major energy efficiency project with the start up of a 120-acre
solar facility in the Permian Basin, the first of its kind to directly power an oil and gas operation in Texas. To learn more about how this 16.8 megawatt solar farm is helping reduce our carbon impact,
watch our video.
Our vast experience in managing CO2 coupled with our carbon reduction purpose have enabled us to create solutions and partnerships with a diverse set of key stakeholders that work toward improved business and climate solutions:
We also collaborate with the Carbon Capture Coalition and other groups outside of the oil and gas industry to progress solution-driven public policies supporting the advancement of a sustainable, low-carbon economy, including the revised 45Q tax credit in the United States, which has been critical to enabling carbon capture, utilization and storage projects.
As we continue tackling carbon reduction, you can follow our progress
here.
Materials:
Pathway to Net-Zero
CDP Climate Report