"Occidental CEO Unveils Groundbreaking Low-Carbon Vision for Enhanced Oil Recovery and CO2 Capture in Colorado"

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Occidental Petroleum Corp. (NYSE: OXY) is securing drilling permits in Colorado with unprecedented regularity, a trend that has the energy giant's CEO envisioning ambitious carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery projects in the state. The Houston-based company, which is Colorado's largest oil and gas producer, may have faced a rare setback in March, but has since grown comfortable enough with the state's stringent regulations to consider Colorado as a key player in the company's low-carbon oil vision, on par with its larger operations in Texas - as long as regulatory predictability can be maintained, according to Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub in an exclusive interview with the Denver Business Journal.

Hollub's ambitious vision for the future includes investing in Colorado plants that capture carbon dioxide from the air and use it to enhance oil well production, as well as in new natural gas-burning power plants that create electricity without greenhouse gas emissions. The company is already building its first direct-air-capture plant in Texas, a $1.1 billion facility that will gather 1 million tons of greenhouse gas annually and pipe it deep underground for permanent storage or to be used in industrial processes.

In the coming years, Occidental aims to start using CO2 from direct-air-capture systems and emissions gathered from industrial processes in Colorado for enhanced oil and gas production from horizontal wells, according to Hollub. The company's long-term plan in Colorado would boost production from oil and gas wells in the Denver-Julesburg Basin using CO2 from the company's direct-air-capture systems that may be powered by Net Power plants, creating a low-carbon fossil fuel energy business positioned to address climate concerns.

Hollub described the oil and chemical refining giant's transformational vision and Colorado's place in that plan, saying "The DJ Basin is a big part of that. The biggest concern we have about Colorado is that so often people are trying to change the regulations. Regulatory certainty is critically important for us, because we can't make a decision to do a huge investment somewhere if we don't know whether the rules might change in two or three years. We don't mind regulation, and we don't mind it being strict. We do think we need to change the way we operate. We need to be different today from the way we were doing things several years ago, and we need to more focused on doing things better. I think the greenhouse gas regulations in Colorado are nation-leading, but they're regulations that we can meet, and they're important to have in place for the environment and the world."

Source: Occidental.com 

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