'Unlike anything else in the world': Harris County commissioner announces support for new $100 billion Houston CCS hub

A new $100 billion carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) hub in Houston has earned the support of a Harris County commissioner during a Sept. 23 event.

Vice president of strategy development for Exxon Mobil’s new Low Carbon Solutions business, Erik Oswald, spoke during a presentation at the Gulf Coast Industry Forum in Pasadena.

“You’ve got an enormous number of point-source emitters relatively close together, and importantly, they’re very close to a truly world-class sequestration area in the offshore Gulf of Mexico,” Oswald told Houston Business Journal. 

The area, Oswald said, is perfectly suited to host what would be the world’s largest CCS hub.

“You don’t have very much distance between where the emissions are and where the sequestration is, which keeps the costs down pretty significantly,” Oswald said. 

If all 11 companies supporting the plan captured all of their plants' carbon emissions, they could capture and store up to 75 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2040, the Journal states. 

“The scale of what you can achieve here is unlike anything else in the world,” Oswald added. 

In a recent announcement, the city cited plans to go carbon neutral by 2050, and this CCS hub plan is one of the main ways the city plans on reaching that goal.

According to the article, this proposal will likely improve the quality of life in eastern Harris County, which could bring even more growth to the area.