So far, no full-scale Net Power plant has been built.
#Green gorilla odessa upgrade#
(On the day I visited the plant in February, power generation was down for an inspection, and as of mid-March it remained down for an upgrade of a key part.) A small one exists at the end of a gravel road in an industrial part of La Porte, Texas, on the southeast fringe of Houston.
#Green gorilla odessa series#
The project will be located on an Oxy oilfield not far from Odessa, Texas, says Bill Brown, chief executive of Net Power, which refers to the initiative internally as “Project Odessa.” Odessa is the quintessential Permian oil town immortalized in the book, film, and TV series “Friday Night Lights.” Occidental, known as Oxy, says it will build a commercial-scale Net Power plant by 2023 in the Permian Basin, a vast stretch of western Texas and eastern New Mexico in which Oxy long has shot CO₂ into aging oilfields to loosen oil in the rock and coax more of it up to the surface. If the Net Power machinery could be rolled out affordably and at scale-still a big “if”-it could boost demand for natural gas, a glut of which is flooding the Permian and the U.S.Īt the Texas oilfield, Oxy intends the Net Power contraption to power a machine to capture CO₂ from the air, a technology developed by Carbon Engineering, a Canadian firm in which Oxy also has invested. Together, Oxy says, the two machines, which Oxy intends to perch atop a number of its Permian oilfields, would sequester enough CO₂ to render the oil Oxy pulls up there “carbon-neutral.” Additional electricity from the Net Power device would, Brown says, be sold into the power grid. The endgame for Oxy is to boost the profitability of its oil output. Electricity and CO₂ are its two biggest costs in the Permian, and so, to fatten margins, it needs cheaper supplies of both.
Vicki Hollub, Oxy’s CEO, tells me she anticipates the Net Power machinery will slash Oxy’s power costs by at least 25% over the next several years. And she predicts Oxy’s CO₂ costs will fall by perhaps 30% as Oxy shifts to getting its CO2 from increasingly cheap man-made sources rather than, as it now does, buying CO₂ that’s been drilled up from natural underground formations in the American West. On the drawing board in LouisianaĪnother Net Power project is on the drawing board near Louisiana’s Gulf of Mexico coast. Two entities led by Charles “Chas” Roemer IV, whose father is former Louisiana governor Charles “Buddy” Roemer III, are working with Net Power and with Siemens, the German industrial-equipment giant, to cobble together the money and the government approvals necessary to build a massive liquefied-natural-gas facility that they say would be essentially carbon-neutral.
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