NPR: This oil company invests in pulling CO2 out of the sky — so it can keep selling crude

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NOTREES, Texas — One of the boldest, most controversial experiments in fighting climate change is taking shape in a dirt patch in West Texas.

In a couple of years, giant fans will start whirring at the Stratos facility near Notrees, a town in the wind-swept Permian Basin of Texas.

It will capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and inject it underground, in a process called direct air capture.

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And the company behind it is not a university, or a Silicon Valley startup. It is, in fact, an oil company: Occidental Petroleum, or Oxy for short, an American producer that's placing a bet on this technology.

Why? Well, there's money, naturally. Companies looking to offset their emissions are willing to pay to get carbon removed from the atmosphere and stored underground. The government is putting billions of dollars into this technology. And Occidental has the right expertise to scale this technology up and bring costs down, thanks to similarities between direct air capture and oil production.

But there's another reason. And it's no secret.

The company intends to use the technology to do what it does best: to extract more oil, thus helping prolong the life of the same fossil fuels that climate experts say need to be wound down.

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And by combining the two, the company even thinks it can market "net-zero" oil — because the carbon captured while producing the oil "cancels out" the CO2 released by burning it. Oxy's CEO, Vicki Hollub, has been consistently clear about her hope for the technology.

"If it's produced in the way that I'm talking about, there's no reason not to produce oil and gas forever," Hollub told NPR.

It's the kind of comment that makes climate advocates scream, and even some supporters of Oxy wince. Because the question it raises is obvious.

Is direct air capture a way to save the world? Or a way to save the oil industry?

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Occidental's ambitions are being charted by Hollub, a 63-year-old oil executive with the backing of Warren Buffett and a history of making bold bets. Starting as an engineer, she rose through the ranks at Oxy to become its CEO in 2016 — a rare female leader in the mostly all-boys club of the Texas oil fields.

Her climate stance, too, is unusual. Occidental has set a net-zero target that includes the emissions from the oil it sells, a first for a big U.S. oil company.

Sucking carbon from the sky and injecting it underground is key to that vision.

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The technology to pull carbon dioxide from the air is not new. It's been around since the 1950s, and companies like Carbon Engineering have been pitching it as a climate solution for more than a decade. The challenge was doing it at a massive scale, and for a reasonable cost.

Dan Friedmann, the CEO of Carbon Engineering, the company Oxy bought, is used to people questioning why a climate startup would pair up with an oil giant.

He has a simple answer.

"We needed somebody that could build billion-dollar plants. Oxy can," Friedmann told NPR in an interview earlier this year. "We needed a company that was willing to go into this business with their top people, their money — and frankly, to this day, I can't find another one other than Oxy."

Friedmann also emphasized the challenge of putting carbon dioxide underground after it's captured.

"The only people in the world that know how to do that are oil companies, and Oxy is the world expert," Friedmann says.

That's because Oxy injects a lot of carbon dioxide into the earth already as part of its oil production.

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Oxy actually sees benefits for the oil and gas industry even if the captured carbon isn't used for oil production. Just the ability to purchase "carbon removal credits" might persuade some companies and countries that they don't need to move as quickly to reduce their use of oil.

Climate experts, however, say the world needs to scale up direct air capture, while also massively reducing the use of oil and gas, and reject arguments that the technology can actually be used to justify more oil production.

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"Removing carbon from the atmosphere is costly and uncertain," Fatih Birol, the head of the IEA, said this fall. "We must do everything possible to stop putting it there in the first place."

Some climate advocates have a more profound distrust of this technology. They see it not just as risky, but as a con: a way to distract and delay climate action altogether.

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But Hollub's public statements about extending the life of oil have fueled the mounting tensions over whether the direct air technology is being used to delay a transition from oil.

"Whether it's good or bad depends on the how," says Natasha Vidangos, the senior director for climate innovation and technology at the Environmental Defense Fund.

That, in turn, will decide whether direct air capture, if it can even be scaled up, is actually helpful for the fight against climate change — or is just an excuse to stop trying.

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