The oil giant Exxon Mobil wants to clean up. Away with the evil CO2 and back to the earth where it came from. The group communicated the inspiring idea just in the week, as Joe Biden wants to make a fresh start in climate protection. It is: Carbon Capture and Storage, short CCS and long the technically highly complex way of separating or filtering CO2 in order to store or recycle it. Exxon wants to clean up emissions from the fifty dirtiest plants on the industrial canal in Houston, which are mainly oil refineries and petrochemical plants. The compressed CO2 is to migrate via pipeline to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, for which the company of course wants to be paid from the American production pots.
When companies find ways to capture CO2 that is already in the air in order to make it usable as a raw material for industry, there is no objection to this. But to camouflage a technology as a climate solution that is currently neither clear how efficiently it works nor whether it is ever economical, because compression, transport and storage themselves consume immense amounts of energy, is madness. All this only so that the fossil industry can blow more and more CO2 into the atmosphere.
CCS is a subjunctive technology, renewable energies are already working. They produce much cleaner energy, globally speaking, for less money. Making them even better and cheaper should be the order of the day. Exxon’s proposal is nothing but a green-wrapped delaying tactic. If the sink in danger of overflowing, not cloth, and Feudel solver the problem best. If you do not want wet feet, you must try to turn off the tap.
