A big day in the UK for carbon capture and storage

Our Low Carbon Solutions business was awarded four licenses to test for potential locations to store captured CO₂ emissions deep underneath the UK North Sea. We’ll partner with Shell on three of the licenses, and Neptune Energy on the fourth. The licenses were awarded by UK regulator the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA). 

According to the NSTA, the areas included in the licensing round cover about 12,000 square kilometers (4,630 square miles) and could store up to 30 million metric tons of CO₂ per year by 2030 – equal to about 10% of the UK’s emissions in 2021. The potential storage areas are a mix of depleted oil and gas reservoirs and saline aquifers. 

ExxonMobil is already a global leader in CCS, and is scaling up the technology to help accelerate society’s path to net zero. At the U.S. Gulf Coast, the total CO₂ we’ve agreed to store for third-party customers has reached 5 million metric tons per year – roughly equivalent to replacing about 2 million gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles. 

ExxonMobil is investing $17 billion in lower emission initiatives from 2022 to 2027, including its efforts to scale up CCS to help reduce emissions for third parties and for our own operations.