Oxy Utilizes Land to Store as Much as 3 Billion Tons of Captured Carbon

Occidental (Oxy), its carbon capture, use, and sequestration platform subsidiary 1PointFive, and agricultural production and resource management business King Ranch have announced a new lease arrangement to facilitate the bulk storage of CO2 from Direct Air Capture (DAC) projects.

The new deal will grant access to 106,000 acres in Kleberg County, Texas, with the capacity to remove up to 30 million metric tonnes of CO2 annually and store up to 3 billion metric tonnes of CO2 in geologic reservoirs.

The agreement follows the August announcement by Oxy and 1PointFive of their intention to construct the world's largest DAC plant to date in the Texas Permian Basin, with the capacity to capture up to 500,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year at launch and the potential to scale to 1 million tonnes.

According to the companies, the new arrangement will allow up to thirty DAC plants to be grown on the leased land.

DAC technology, identified by the IEA as a crucial carbon removal alternative in the transition to a net-zero energy system, harvests CO2 directly from the atmosphere for use as a raw material or for permanent removal when paired with storage. According to the landmark IPCC climate change mitigation report published earlier this year, scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C include carbon dioxide removal methods scaling to billions of tonnes of removal annually over the coming decades, with DAC potentially accounting for a significant portion of the total.

Currently under development in the Texas Permian Basin is Oxy's first DAC plant.

Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental, said:

We think that large-scale DAC, a new way to remove CO2 through engineering, will help companies and countries reduce their net CO2 emissions and reach the size needed to make a difference in the global effort to stop climate change.