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ExxonMobil has a new plan to sell more methane gas in a warming world: Frame it as a climate-friendly solution for artificial intelligence.
The fossil fuel giant is proposing to build massive gas-fired data center campuses—complete with power plants and pipeline infrastructure—to power the immensely energy-intensive AI boom. It’s also promising that this will be totally fine for the planet, because Exxon will remove 90 percent of the emissions from those facilities with taxpayer-funded carbon capture.
“We can offer a low-carbon data center where more than 90 percent of the emissions are captured and abated,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in an October earnings call.
He repeated the claim a few weeks later in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We can provide low-carbon data centers,” Woods said, “removing about 90 percent plus of the carbon to help solve the emissions associated with this short-term need and demand.”
Woods’s claims were not challenged in either venue. But according to energy experts, they should have been, because carbon capture has never been used successfully at a commercial gas-fired power plant in the U.S., and no existing carbon capture facility has ever consistently achieved a 90 percent capture rate.
“I’d like to see a commercial scale facility that runs for a period of time that’s actually capturing that level of CO2,” said Anika Juhn, an energy data analyst at the independent think tank Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “But I think we are seeing an example of the great greenwashing that [carbon capture] is, and people jumping on that bandwagon.”
And people are indeed jumping on the bandwagon, despite carbon capture’s shaky track record. Last week, major utility company NextEra Energy told investors it would work with Exxon to build a “carbon-abated” gas-powered facility at a yet-to-be-determined site in the Southeast, where it will be connected to the oil giant’s existing carbon dioxide pipeline network running through Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The companies will then sell the 1.2 gigawatt site to a potential big tech customer that will use the capacity—enough to power 750,000 homes.
It remains to be seen whether Exxon and NextEra will actually be able to capture all the carbon emissions they say they will. But if they can’t, their promise of “low-carbon” AI could easily transform into a sprawling build-out of high-polluting methane gas infrastructure—one with lasting consequences for both the climate and communities nearby.
Exxon isn’t the only fossil fuel company powering the AI boom. Other companies including Chevron, Energy Transfer, and Enbridge have made their own forays into directly supplying data centers with gas pipelines and power plants.
But Exxon is one of the only companies explicitly telling investors that it will build “low-carbon data centers” using carbon capture. Woods said that “in the near to medium term, [Exxon is] probably the only realistic game in town” to accomplish that feat.
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