Engineers stoke hopes for carbon management in Kern
Jul. 13—Engineers with Kern County's three largest oil producers made the case Thursday for moving forward locally with large-scale carbon capture and sequestration, not only as a climate priority but also from an economic development standpoint.
During a panel discussion hosted by the North of the River Chamber of Commerce, representatives of Aera Energy LLC, California Resources Corp. and Chevron Corp. offered layman's-level commentaries on the opportunities and challenges of removing carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks — or harder yet, pulling it straight from the atmosphere — and then either burying it deep below local oil fields or reusing it in manufacturing.
Two of the speakers noted that projects proposed in Kern are attracting attention elsewhere such that any local success is likely to be emulated, or possibly exported, around the globe.
"This is an opportunity for us to take a technical lead to projects that can be developed worldwide," said Ken Haney, strategic advisor on carbon management at CRC.
Little was said about the more controversial aspects that have made the activity a target for local environmental justice groups that argue carbon capture and sequestration presents asphyxiation risks and amounts to a taxpayer handout to the oil industry. In that sense, Thursday's luncheon at Hodel's Country Dining came off less as a forum than a pitch for community support.
CCS has become a focus for oil producers as the industry charts a future aligned with the Biden and Newsom administrations' anti-petroleum policies alongside financial support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Local projects are in various stages of review as large local oil producers await a federal decision on where to establish four national CCS hubs.
Thursday's discussion, moderated by the chamber's President-elect Rob Duchow, local public affairs manager at Southern California Gas Co., opened with assessments that CCS appears particularly well-suited to Kern because of the county's appropriate geological formations, capable industrial workforce and business-friendly approach to permitting.
Participants pointed to decades of progress in CCS, the oldest form of which involves using CO2 to promote oil production. Other applications of the technology have reduced power plants' carbon footprint or, in rarer instances, removed and buried carbon from the air.
While the latter has generated the most hope in Sacramento, speakers Thursday said so-called direct air capture faces the highest technological and economic hurdles. They said nearer-term projects have the potential to decarbonize steel and cement industries that remain large emitters of CO2.
Safety-related sensitivities were brought up indirectly by Hilary Petrizzo, SoCalGas's commercial development manager of carbon capture. She emphasized the company wants to be mindful as it places pipelines that would connect large CO2 producers to permanent sequestration sites. Doing so could prove tricky as activists push to keep them away from residential areas as a way of minimizing leak risks.
Speakers acknowledged oil companies are competing to develop local CCS projects, but they noted that, in some respects, the activity represents something of a group effort as they work to overcome permitting and technical challenges.
"One individual company is not going to make this happen in Kern County. It's going to be everyone rowing in the same direction," Aera's carbon strategy and technology manager, Jonathan Dethloff, told Thursday's audience. "We're all kind of rooting each other's projects on."
Haney brought up the potential that CCS may present for new employment. CRC's plan to remove CO2 from the emissions stream at its Elk Hills power plant, he said, is expected to create 4,000 jobs during three years of construction, then sustain 200 jobs per year during operation.
It will be important to make progress on local CCS projects in order to test theoretical assumptions and develop different innovation pathways, said Project Manager David Wessels of Chevron New Energies' Kern River Eastridge division. He added, "The rest of the world is watching."
"If is definitely California-focused now," Wessels said, "but there are so many eyes on this."
