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Exxon Mobil and Chevron Both oil giants are joining the race to power artificial intelligence data centers as they bet technology companies will eventually turn to natural gas to meet their massive energy needs.
Exxon Corporation Announce plan A natural gas plant will be built this week to power the data center. The oil giant said it would then use carbon capture and storage technology to reduce the plant’s emissions by 90%.
“We are working with other large industrial companies to quickly deploy a solution that provides highly reliable and low-carbon intensity power to meet the needs of workers,” ExxonMobil Chief Financial Officer Katherine Mickels told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday. The growing demand for smart computing capabilities.
Mickels said the natural gas plant will not be reliant on the grid and will be independent of utilities, allowing it to be installed faster than traditional power generation projects. ExxonMobil has not disclosed customers or a timeline for the project.
ExxonMobil has invested heavily in building a carbon capture network along the Gulf Coast, with more than 900 miles of pipelines to transport carbon dioxide from multiple industrial customers to permanent storage sites. The oil major estimates that decarbonized AI data centers could account for 20% of its total addressable market for carbon capture and storage by 2050.
Jeff Gustavson, president of Chevron’s new energy business, said at the Reuters NEXT conference on Wednesday that Chevron is also studying ways to power data centers.
“Our company is very well positioned to participate,” Gustafson said. Chevron is a major national natural gas producer with power generation equipment and large tracts of land that could be used for data centers, the executive said.
Natural gas is better than nuclear power
letter, Amazon, Microsoft and Yuan They primarily purchase wind and solar energy for data centers as they seek to mitigate the climate impact of their operations. But the power needs of artificial intelligence are growing so much that tech companies are looking for more reliable sources of electricity than renewable energy.
As a result, technology companies are showing increasing interest in nuclear power. Microsoft is helping restore operations at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor by purchasing electricity from the plant. Amazon and Alphabet’s Google unit are investing in the next generation of small nuclear reactors. Meta recently called on companies to send it proposals for building new nuclear power plants.
But the fossil fuel industry and energy analysts have argued for months that the tech industry will eventually have to embrace natural gas because nuclear plants take too long to build.
ExxonMobil Chief Executive Darren Woods on Wednesday lashed out at nuclear power and claimed his company is better positioned than any U.S. company to meet the power needs of artificial intelligence in the near and near term.
“If you’re betting on nuclear and the future, we have a long road ahead of us,” Woods told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday. The small nuclear reactors technology companies are investing in are not expected to be commercialized until the 2030s.
The CEO said ExxonMobil does not plan to enter the power generation business. Woods said the company plans to use its expertise in leading large projects to help install power generation equipment in data centers in the early stages of artificial intelligence development.
Woods said that once the early stages are complete, ExxonMobil will focus on capturing and storing emissions associated with data centers and supplying decarbonized natural gas to power plants that run AI.
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