Today’s pressing questions are often how to satisfy Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting requirements to obtain funding from socially and environmentally concerned investors. Many companies have strong commitments to reducing emissions and increasing energy efficiency, but the ESG requirements appear to involve more than this. ESG requirements involve water use reduction, use of renewable energy, and social concerns that are often under-represented in disclosures that investors are evaluating. These social disclosures may involve impacts on the local community through products, services, and community involvement.
As more and more carbon capture is required to obtain permits, this is often viewed as a blockage instead of looking at it as an opportunity to expand markets. Gas plants produce waste heat. Adding carbon capture adds even more heat. The question is whether our industry can utilize waste heat to benefit the communities we live in? Can we provide marketable CO2 to our communities to grow foods, make fertilizers, or fuels? What local industries can best utilize the surplus heat from a gas plant operation? How do we keep our plants safely sited and transfer the heat to nearby businesses that can use it?
Even if 100% of the plant CO2 created isn’t captured for sequestration or other uses, designing the plants to provide valuable and essential other services to the community may improve the scoring that some investors may require. Adding scalable CO2 capture to allow for additional waste heat or other markets may be a good policy for some locations. The same may apply to scalable blue or green hydrogen production (or a combination of both) if a CO2-to-fuels or fertilizer plant is combined with the gas plant.
In the past, the oil industry has often chosen to stay with what it knows best—oil and gas production and processing. This has made choices rather simple and straightforward. The ESG challenge may be pushing the industry to expand its view of what it should offer the communities that it serves and markets it delivers to. Growing these choices may lead to new cash streams in the future.
If CO2 emissions concern you, and you wish to explore methods to reduce CO2 and possibly increase markets for your CO2, please contact me and let’s work on this together.