It has a use and can be deployed today for high concentration streams. But as you move down the emissions profile and get to lower and lower concentrations of CO2 streams, the existing technology is challenged. And so it becomes very expensive for every ton of carbon that you reduce. And so the challenge is use the existing technology today for these high concentration streams where you can make the economics work, but then find a lower cost method to deploy for these less concentrated streams that still make it economic. So that’s been the challenge that we’re working on, recognizing that the existing technology was designed for a different purpose. We need a new technology here and we’re trying to take advantage of material science development, things have happened with materials, with nanostructures.
There’s a lot of advances in technology since the existing technology was developed. And so there’s a question of how can we better capture CO2 by using advances in the existing technology. We think we’ve come up with an opportunity to potentially do that, but it’s early days like all these technology developments. And so we built a pilot plant and we’ll see and test out some of these new capabilities and test the cost effectiveness of capture. I’d say our first step, we’re looking to get about a cost reduction of about half. But I would tell you that’s still not enough. But if we can see a significant step change in that cost or path to that cost reduction, that gives us hope that we can then continue to advance that and get it back — get it down to something that is more competitive and then economic to deploy across the world.
If we can crack that nut, as I’ve said many times before, the holy grail in addressing emissions is direct air capture. And the challenge for the industry is to find ways to do that more cost effectively. And frankly, we’re at the very early stages of the technology and the technology development. So whether we’re successful or somebody else is successful, I feel like this is an area worth exploring. And I think our technology companies have got some great ideas, know how to scale things, know how to optimize not only materials but processes and bringing all that together to see if we can’t make a step change here is the objective. And it’s too early to judge how successful we’ll be, but I certainly feel like we’ve got the capabilities and should be working hard to try to make advances here.
Jeoffrey Lambujon: Great. Looking forward to your updates in the space there. Thank you.
Darren Woods: You bet. Thank you.
Jennifer Driscoll: Thanks, everybody, for joining our call today and for the questions you asked. We’ll post a transcript of the Q&A session on our investor website later this week or early next week. Have a nice weekend everybody. And with that, we’ll turn it back to the operator to conclude our call.
Operator: This concludes today’s call. We thank everyone again for their participation.
