Thread regarding ExxonMobil Corp. layoffs

Occidental is already moving ahead with commercial Carbon Capture and Storage projects while XOM is still in the "study phase".

Midwest CO2 Superhighway
We have identified over 50 industrial CO2 emitters that qualify for 45Q tax credits with operations in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Source: Oxy Low Carbon Ventures

We plan to capture their emitted CO2 and build a pipeline to transport it to the Permian Basin where we have existing infrastructure to inject and permanently sequester the CO2 underground. This project is expected to capture and store over 40 million tons of CO2 per year—the equivalent of more than 6 million passenger car emissions.

https://www.oxylowcarbon.com/carbon-capture-technology/projects#carbon-engineering

Other companies are three steps ahead in CCS technology. Instead of investing mega XOM R&D dollars, we could have just bought off the shelf CCS technology.

Honeywell Technology Enables Large U.S. Carbon Capture and Storage Project
Honeywell UOP to support reduction in CO2 emissions and production of clean hydrogen energy at Wabash Valley plant
12 April 202

https://uop.honeywell.com/en/news-events/2021/april/honeywell-technology-enables-large-u-s-carbon-capture-and-storage-project?utm_source=linkedin-elevate&utm_medium=organic-social&utm_campaign=202104-uop-sts-wabashvalleyresources&utm_content=press-release&utm_term=null

DES PLAINES, III., April 12, 2021 – Honeywell (NYSE: HON) today announced Wabash Valley Resources LLC has selected a range of Honeywell UOP technologies to capture and sequester up to 1.65 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually and to produce clean hydrogen energy from a repurposed gasification plant in West Terre Haute, Ind. The project is expected to be one of the largest carbon sequestration initiatives in the United States to date.

“By implementing Honeywell UOP’s proven technologies for the capture of CO2 and hydrogen purification, we will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Dan Williams, Managing Director of Wabash Valley Resources. “This project will allow for market access to clean hydrogen, as well as support the domestic growth of the hydrogen economy.”

“Adding carbon capture and storage to hydrogen production is an economical solution for many companies looking to make significant progress on their sustainability goals,” said Laura Leonard, vice president and general manager, UOP Process Technologies. “Hydrogen is a versatile energy carrier that can provide a low-carbon solution across almost every industry—petrochemical and refining, buildings, commercial, transportation and power generation. Customers like Wabash trust Honeywell UOP to provide optimized technology solutions to meet project requirements.”
UOP will provide technology licenses, basic engineering, and specialty equipment including a modular MOLSIV™ molecular sieve dehydration unit, modular Ortloff CO2 Fractionation unit, and Polybed™ pressure swing adsorption (PSA) unit to sequester carbon dioxide and process synthesis gas from the gasification unit.

The Ortloff CO2 Fractionation technology will produce a high-purity liquid CO2 stream while separating a hydrogen-rich stream that will be purified by the PSA unit. The CO2 stream will be sent for permanent geological storage, while the hydrogen stream can fuel a hydrogen turbine to generate electrical power.. The hydrogen stream can also be used in chemical synthesis, or marketed as a clean transportation fuel.

As noted in a recent U.S. Department of Energy hydrogen plan, a study by the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association estimates the hydrogen economy can generate as much as $140 billion per year in revenue and create 700,000 U.S. jobs by 2030. At projected growth rates, this could grow to $750 billion per year in revenue and 3.4 million jobs by 2050.

UOP’s range of solutions for hydrogen purification (Honeywell H2 Solutions) and CO2 separation (Honeywell CO2 Solutions) can be optimized for any use application. The technologies include:

UOP molecular sieve (MOLSIV) technology, which is used in a wide range of operating conditions in more than 2,400 units worldwide. MOLSIV, which has been around for more than 60 years, can be used for acid gas removal, dehydration, hydrocarbon removal and desulfurization of various gas and liquid gas streams including syngas, natural gas and gas liquids such as propane and butane.

The Ortloff CO2 Fractionation process, which can efficiently remove 80% of the CO2 content contained in the syngas stream; the remaining CO2 is subsequently removed by the PSA unit. The
recovered CO2 is produced as a liquid for easy pressurization, transportation, and sequestration.

The PSA process, which uses proprietary UOP adsorbents to remove impurities at high pressure from hydrogen-containing process streams, producing high purity hydrogen. The Polybed PSA system can also recover and purify hydrogen from ethylene off-gas, methanol off-gas and partial-oxidation synthesis gas.

UOP Modular systems are skid-mounted units including hardware, adsorbents, control systems and embedded process technology. This allows quick and efficient installation to reduce cost and downtime when compared to “stick-built” construction.

Wabash Valley Resources LLC (WVR), an affiliate of Phibro LLC, acquired a world scale gasification plant in 2016, with plans to convert it to a hydrogen production plant and carbon capture and sequestration project. The project was recently selected to receive funding from the Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Carbon Storage Program. The Program's objective is the advancement, development and validation of technologies that enable safe cost-effective, and permanent geologic storage of carbon dioxide.

Honeywell UOP (www.uop.com) is a leading international supplier and licensor of process technology, catalysts, adsorbents, equipment, and consulting services to the petroleum refining, petrochemical, and gas processing industries. Honeywell UOP is part of Honeywell’s Performance Materials and Technologies strategic business group, which also includes Honeywell Process Solutions (www.honeywellprocess.com), a pioneer in automation control, instrumentation and services for the oil and gas, refining, petrochemical, chemical and other industries.

Honeywell recently committed to achieve carbon neutrality in its operations and facilities by 2035. This commitment builds on the company’s track record of sharply reducing the greenhouse gas intensity of its operations and facilities as well as its decades-long history of innovation to help its customers meet their environmental and social goals. About half of Honeywell’s new product introduction research and development investment is directed toward products that improve environmental and social outcomes for customers.

Anything that happens at Corporate Strategic Research (CSR) is a bunch of cr-p. The management and executives seem so uneducated and untruthful. EM is not leading anything in CCS but instead using it to leech onto the hype and wiggle their way around the climate atrocities... remember their algae BS?

We can likely capture carbon as well as anyone since all the technology is commercially available and does not require anything from our research organizations (Thank goodness) Right now there are no penalties for CO2 going up the stack so we don’t do it.

If a big carbon tax is slapped on we can respond and it will be like all the environmental compliance projects we did the last 20 years. Last minute and lowest cost.

No one in industry is really doing it to a large extent now.

This is way easier than building a chemical plant or refinery.

Don’t know where the captured carbon will go but capturing it is not a big deal.

Dr. Emil Jacobs, VP of research and development at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering
Another major loser

The answer to carbon capture and storage is "MOFs"

ExxonMobil, UC Berkeley, Berkeley Lab develop new MOF for carbon capture and steam regeneration
25 July 2020

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2020/07/20200725-mof.html

Scientists from ExxonMobil, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a new material that could capture more than 90% of CO2 emitted from industrial sources using low-temperature steam, requiring less energy for the overall carbon capture process.

Laboratory tests indicate the patent-pending materials—tetraamine-functionalized metal organic frameworks—capture carbon dioxide emissions up to six times more effectively than conventional amine-based carbon capture technology. Using less energy to capture and remove carbon, the material has the potential to reduce the cost of the technology and eventually support commercial applications.

Power plants strip CO2 from flue emissions today by bubbling flue gases through organic amines in water, which bind and extract the carbon dioxide. The liquid is then heated to 120-150 ˚C (250-300 ˚F) to release the CO2 gas, after which the liquids are reused. The entire process consumes about 30% of the power generated. Sequestering the captured CO2 underground costs an additional, though small, fraction of that.

Six years ago, senior researcher Jeffrey Long, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and of chemical and biomolecular engineering and senior faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab, and his group in UC Berkeley’s Center for Gas Separations, which is funded by the US Department of Energy, discovered a chemically modified MOF that readily captures CO2 from concentrated power plant flue emissions, potentially reducing the capture cost by half.

They added diamine molecules to a magnesium-based MOF to catalyze the formation of polymer chains of CO2 that could then be purged by flushing with a humid stream of carbon dioxide.

For CO2 capture, steam stripping—where you use direct contact with steam to take off the CO2—has been a sort of holy grail for the field. It is rightly seen as the cheapest way to do it. These materials, at least from the experiments we have done so far, look very promising.

—Jeffrey Long
By manipulating the structure of the metal organic framework material, the team of scientists and students demonstrated the ability to condense a surface area the size of a football field, into just one gram of mass—about the same as a paperclip—that acts as a sponge for CO2. Results of the research were published in Science.

ExxonMobil’s team, led by senior research associate Simon Weston, along with UC Berkeley’s Long and his team of faculty and students have been working collaboratively for eight years to develop this potential carbon capture solution that demonstrates stability in the presence of water vapor, without oxidation, allowing carbon dioxide to be captured from various sources, under a number of conditions.

Additional research and development will be needed to progress this technology to a larger scale pilot and ultimately to industrial scale.

The research successfully demonstrated that these hybrid porous metal-organic materials are highly selective and could capture more than 90% of the CO2 emitted from industrial sources. The materials have much greater capacity for capturing carbon dioxide and can be regenerated for repeated use by using low-temperature steam, requiring less energy for the overall carbon capture process.

The work was funded by ExxonMobil, which is working with both the Berkeley group and Long’s start-up, Mosaic Materials Inc., to develop, scale up and test processes for stripping CO2 from emissions.

Resources

Eugene J. Kim, Rebecca L. Siegelman, Henry Z. H. Jiang, Alexander C. Forse, Jung-Hoon Lee, Jeffrey D. Martell, Phillip J. Milner, Joseph M. Falkowski, Jeffrey B. Neaton, Jeffrey A. Reimer, Simon C. Weston, Jeffrey R. Long (2020) “Cooperative carbon capture and steam regeneration with tetraamine-appended metal–organic frameworks” Science doi: 10.1126/science.abb3976

Posted on 25 July 2020 in Carbon Capture and Conversion (CCC), Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), Emissions, Materials | Permalink | Comments (5)

Algae R&D was launched in 2009 with very explicit deliverables and the estimated cost was $600M.
Not sure what "PHASE" we are at in 2021??

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/07/exxonmobil-sgi-20090714.html

ExxonMobil Launches Major Advanced Algal Biofuel Research and Development Program With Synthetic Genomics; More than $600M Targeted
14 July 2009

ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company (EMRE) has launched what it calls a “significant” new program to research and develop advanced biofuels from photosynthetic algae that are compatible with today’s gasoline and diesel fuels. As part of the program, ExxonMobil has formed a strategic research and development alliance with Synthetic Genomics Inc., a privately held company focused on developing genomic-driven solutions and founded by genome pioneer, Dr. J. Craig Venter.

Under the program, if research and development milestones are successfully met, ExxonMobil expects to spend more than $600 million, which includes $300 million in internal costs. As part of the multi-faceted agreement, SGI will receive milestone payments for achievements in developing technology related to algal-based biofuels and related products. Total funding for SGI in research and development activities and milestone payments could amount to more than $300 million with the potential for additional income from licensing to third parties.

The majority of the research performed by SGI will take place in its facilities located in La Jolla, CA. EMRE will conduct its research primarily at its Clinton, NJ and Fairfax, VA facilities. The sites for scale-up activities will be determined at a later date. As part of the agreement SGI will be building a new greenhouse and test facilities, as well as hiring a substantial number of new employees.

Photosynthetic algae, which include microalgae (single-celled algae) and cyanobacteria (most commonly known as blue-green algae) are very efficient at utilizing the energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into cellular oils (lipids) and even some types of long-chain hydrocarbons that can be further processed into fuels and chemicals. Such bio-oils from photosynthetic algae could be used to manufacture a full range of fuels including gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel that meet the same specifications as today’s products.

EMRE estimates that algae could yield more than 2,000 gallons of fuel per acre of production per year. (Earlier post.) Approximate yields for other biofuel sources are far lower:

Palm: 650 gallons per acre per year
Sugar cane: 450 gallons per acre per year
Corn: 250 gallons per acre per year
Soy: 50 gallons per acre per year

However, naturally-occurring algae do not carry out this process at the efficiencies or rates necessary for commercial-scale production of biofuels.

Using SGI’s scientific expertise and proprietary tools and technologies in genomics, metagenomics, synthetic genomics, and genome engineering as a platform, SGI and EMRE believe that biology can now be harnessed to produce sufficient quantities of biofuels.

Under the terms of the agreement, SGI will work in a systematic approach to find, optimize, and/or engineer superior strains of algae. The teams will also look to define and develop the best production systems—open (ponds), and/or closed (e.g. tubular) photobioreactors—for large-scale cultivation of algae and conversion of their products into useful biofuels.

ExxonMobil’s engineering and scientific expertise will be utilized throughout the program, from the development of systems to increase the scale of algae production through to the manufacturing of finished fuels.

Main identified activities of the program include:

(1) Identifying and/or developing algal strains that can achieve high bio-oil yields at lower cost.
(2) Determining the best production systems to use for growing algal strains, either in open (ponds) or closed (e.g. tubular) photobioreactors, or both.
(3) Determining how to supply large amounts of carbon dioxide needed to grow algae, which could provide benefits for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.
(4) Developing the large, integrated systems required for full scale, economic production, upgrading and commercialization of biofuels.

The SGI/EMRE biofuel advancement from photosynthetic algae will proceed through six phases, each representing an essential step in the production chain:

Phase One: Algae development and growth
Phase Two: Algae harvesting
Phase Three: Recovery of bio-oil produced by the algae
Phase Four: Transport and storage of bio-oil
Phase Five: Conversion of bio-oil to biofuel
Phase Six: Production of commercial products

Primary Roles in the EMRE and SGI Strategic Alliance

EMRE KEY ROLE
(1) Leadership role in engineering, process development and scale up.
(2) Key role in determining which type of production systems to utilize to grow the algae.
(3) Key role in upgrading bio-oil produced by photosynthetic algae into finished products, and total process integration for development and commercial applications.

SGI KEY ROLE
(1) Leadership role in biological research for algae strain development, growth and harvesting.
(2) Key role in determining which type of production systems to use to grow the algae.
(3) Key role in bio-oil recovery research and development.

Scientists at SGI have been working internally for several years to develop more efficient means to harvest the oils that photosynthetic algae produce. Traditionally, algae have been treated like a crop to be grown and harvested in a process that can be expensive and time consuming. One of SGI’s achievements has been in engineering algal strains that produce lipids in a continuous process that is currently more efficient and cost-effective.

This investment comes after several years of planning and study and is an important addition to ExxonMobil’s ongoing efforts to advance breakthrough technologies to help meet the world’s energy challenges. Meeting the world’s growing energy demands will require a multitude of technologies and energy sources. We believe that biofuel produced by algae could be a meaningful part of the solution in the future if our efforts result in an economically viable, low net carbon emission transportation fuel.

—Dr. Emil Jacobs, VP of research and development at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering
ExxonMobil’s engineering and scientific expertise will be utilized throughout the program, from the development of systems to increase the scale of algae production through the manufacturing of finished fuels.

The real challenge to creating a viable next generation biofuel is the ability to produce it in large volumes which will require significant advances in both science and engineering. The alliance between SGI and ExxonMobil will bring together the complementary capabilities and expertise of both companies to develop innovative solutions that could lead to the large scale production of biofuel from algae.

—Craig Venter, CEO of SGI
In 2007, SGI and BP entered a long-term research and development deal focused first on gaining a better understanding of the natural microbial communities in various hydrocarbon formations such as oil, natural gas, coal and shale. Such an understanding would enable the enhancement or increased production of the subsurface hydrocarbons. (Earlier post.)

The second phase of the BP/Synthetic Genomics program will be a series of field pilot studies of the most promising bioconversion approaches. BP and Synthetic Genomics will then seek to jointly commercialize the bioconversion of subsurface hydrocarbons into cleaner energy products.

Posted on 14 July 2009 in Algae, Algal Fuels, Bio-hydrocarbons, Biogasoline, Synthetic Biology | Permalink

OP is another White Card Troll

Lol, the part about robots with switches made me laugh. Our OPs manager can be basically replaced with a very basic program:

Runme:
POF = inputbox("What is the risk?")
If POF = "A" or "B" or "C" then
shutdown()
ElseIf POF = "D" then
msgbox("Are you sure, go back")
EndIf

Goto Runme

Made so many du-b calls its not even funny...

Any enemy of my enemy is my 'friend'.

While the message is good.. How can you start off your rant with "Facts" in the title and 1st paragraph say "I find it hard to believe"

EM executives are liars and cheats.

i agree, good post