"When Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s Vicki Hollub introduced the idea of “net zero oil” two years ago, few outside the chief executive officer’s inner circle knew what she meant. It was easy for climate-minded critics to dismiss the rhetoric as a greenwashing ploy from an embattled oil executive trying to stay relevant in a world transitioning away from fossil fuels.
But Hollub’s vision keeps moving closer to reality. This month she helped convince the Biden administration — which has been hostile to Big Oil — to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the technology behind the industry’s most ambitious moonshot to keep fossil fuels alive.
Occidental won one of two major US Department of Energy grants to develop hubs for direct air capture, or DAC. That means Occidental will be in charge of an experimental facility built in Kleberg County, Texas, designed to pull carbon dioxide from ambient air and bury it underground. Hollub followed this milestone federal grant days later by agreeing to a $1.1 billion deal to buy Carbon Engineering. The Canadian startup is Occidental’s technology partner on the government-backed project as well as another another DAC plant in West Texas that — according to the company’s claims — will produce emissions-free crude oil."
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