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Occidental opens solar facility to power oil operations
PERMIAN BASIN
OCCIDENTAL Petroleum has started up a solar facility in Texas that will power an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) project in the Permian Basin’s Goldsmith field. The company also said it had signed a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA) for 109 MW of solar energy beginning in 2021 for Permian operations through its Oxy Low Carbon Ventures (OLCV) subsidiary. The PPA was signed with Macquarie’s Green Invest- ment and Core Solar.
The 174,000-panel, 120-acre (0.5-square km) solar farm is the first large-scale facility of its kind in Texas to be used for directly powering oil and gas operations. According to Occidental, the facility will supply all of the energy requirements for the Goldsmith field’s operations.
The solar farm has a total capacity of 16 MW. The solar panels were built by First Solar, which will also operate the facility.
According to Occidental, the use of power from the solar farm rather than the electric grid has the potential to lower the carbon intensity of the project by 20,000 tons (18,144 tonnes) per year.
Occidental’s president and CEO, Vicki Hol- lub, said at the solar facility’s unveiling that the project was a big step for OLCV and was the first under the company’s initiative to advance a low- er-carbon future by producing carbon-neutral barrels of oil.
“It’s important, in order to cap global warm- ing to two degrees [Celsius] or less,” Hollub said. “Corporate consciousness, to me, is doing the right thing. What we do know is, whether you believe in climate change or not, the reality is, we should make our world better, and the reality is,
that whatever way we can do that, we should do that. We need to work to make the world a better place.”
The move comes as Occidental is also invest- ing in capturing carbon dioxide (CO2). The company is partnering with Carbon Engineer- ing to develop what Hollub said would be the largest direct air-capture facility in the world.
Direct air-capture involves capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and supplying it in a puri- fied form for use or storage, according to Carbon Engineering’s website.
“It is all about carbon reduction in the
atmosphere,” said Occidental’s senior vice
president of power, Joe Matranga. “This car-
bon capture will capture the CO2 in the air, and
then we have to do something with it, and that’s
where our operations come in. We do a lot of also investing in CO2 injections, and the CO2 will ultimately
stay in the ground.”
Hollub also said her company was committed
to finding other ways of reducing its carbon foot- print in the Permian. “We have a vast number of CO2 in this area,” she said. “We have 34 pro- jects here, and we are the largest handlers of CO2 recovery in the world, so we want to (take these initiatives) where we have projects and where we know will work well, then we’re just going to expand on those projects. I think, certainly from the standpoint of using carbon capture, these are ways to cap emissions and cab global warming, and I think we are a leader in that area.”
Occidental also recently signed a deal with GlassPoint for solar-generated steam operations to power operations at the Mukhaizna oilfield in Oman.™
The move comes as Occidental is
capturing carbon dioxide.
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 40 08•October•2019