Green Energy Reporter

As climate change legislation has gone from pie-in-the-sky improbability to a concrete measure that can attract Republican support, it’s instructive to watch Exxon adjust its approach.

Sure, CEO Rex Tillerson is still an official carbon tax supporter, but it appears the company is hedging its bets.

To wit: an op-ed posted on the company’s Web site last week heralds natural gas as an immediate, low-emission solution to America’s energy needs.

There’s some boilerplate in there about a revenue-neutral carbon tax, but that’s just a nod to the company’s official stance. We guess that the real point of this op-ed is to make sure that natural gas has a privileged spot in any climate change legislation, which could revive the cratering price for the commodity.First, the op-ed tells us natural gas is much more realistic than “alternatives”:

Compared to wind, biofuels and other alternatives, oil and natural gas innovations often are overlooked. Yet technological progress in these conventional fuels holds immediate potential to help reduce emissions on a significant scale — all while boosting our economy.

Then we learn that the oil and gas industry has poured $58 billion into low emissions technology in the last decade. The company is particularly keen on its tight gas extraction technology and a technique called Controlled Freeze Zone, which “could help enable carbon capture and storage systems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Much of the op-ed echoes a Sept. 23 letter from senators in states with large natural gas reserves which calls for the Kerry-Boxer bill to provide incentives for natural gas. Gas-fired plants, for example, should be eligible for incentives to research carbon capture and sequestration, just as Waxman-Markey provides incentives for coal-fired plants. I think Exxon has a technology for that!

Most significantly, the senators ask for an “appropriate expansion of natural gas usage,” which kind of speaks for itself. The senators want to use natural gas for electricity generation and expand the use of gas as an alternative fuel for heavy duty and fleet vehicles.

“Recent domestic supply increases make these goals achievable,” the letter states.

As natural gas stockpiles set new records each week and industrial users have cut production sharply, gas companies are sitting on a commodity that has fallen in value 9.4 percent this year, according to Bloomberg.

What do you do when you’re sitting on a lot of energy that nobody wants? You create a market for it, and the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill presents a once in a lifetime opportunity to do just that.

Exxon is just trying to gets its piece of the pie. And really, who can blame them.