spooked. Oil and gas companies like Occidental, on the other hand, have been eager to adopt carbon capture tech if it can keep their business afloat despite federal and state efforts to transition to clean energy. Companies can keep producing fossil fuels and petrochemicals — and generating other kinds of pollution like soot and smog in the process — while purporting to fight climate change at the same time.
In other words, carbon capture becomes a way for companies to cast themselves as environmentally friendly because they say they’re dealing with their greenhouse gas emissions. The caveat is that they’re not necessarily tackling other kinds of pollutants that affect air quality and public health. Moreover, they might introduce additional risks from new carbon capture infrastructure.
Sharing that infrastructure helps solve a big problem for carbon capture: that it’s been prohibitively expensive to deploy. Building a hub near a high concentration of refineries and chemical plants means Occidental will get more bang for its buck. And the Houston area happens to host the biggest petrochemical manufacturing complex in the Western hemisphere.
Wait till we mine for rare earth minerals....oh never mind China will do it and we'll be dependent on it