As America enters a new age of energy expansion, the What Energizes Me interview series spotlights innovative businesses and technologies that are driving U.S. competitiveness forward. BCSE President Lisa Jacobson asks fast-moving industry leaders: What is energizing you?
In this episode, Alex Tiller, CEO of Carbonvert, discusses his company’s carbon capture and storage projects and the role of natural gas in a sustainable energy future.
Lisa Jacobson, President, Business Council for Sustainable Energy: For today, I’m really excited to have with us Alex Tiller, CEO of Carbonvert. Alex, great to have you. Welcome to Washington, DC.
Alex Tiller, CEO, Carbonvert: Thanks, Lisa, I appreciate it.
Jacobson: Well, I’d love to hop into our conversation, and I’d love to hear a little bit more about Carbonvert’s vision and business strategy.
Tiller: Sure. Carbonvert is a carbon capture and storage project developer, so we work in the decarbonization space.
That means we work with heavy industry, refining, petrochemical, power, LNG, and basically any sector that’s in the heavy industry space that’s emitting emissions currently into the atmosphere that wants to clean that up and basically manage those emissions.
It’s a proven technology. We know how to do it. We know how to move CO2 in pipelines, and we know how to inject it downhole and make it stay there. We figured that out when we figured out how to do enhanced oil recovery back in the 70s. We’re taking known technologies and we’re basically applying them under a modern framework.
We have a project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana called GeoDura. That’s an offshore CO2 storage site. It’s in the Gulf waters, but not the water itself. It’s a mile and a half below the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
This is a very intense area for industrial processes. We bring these hydrocarbons down to the coast. We refine them, turn them into products, or liquefy them and send them abroad right around the world for export. It’s a great location to execute carbon management projects like what we’re working on.
By example, we’re working with Commonwealth LNG. They’re developing a new LNG facility right there in Cameron Parish. This is a geologic storage project. We attach capture equipment at their facility and then we take it via a short pipeline run. It turns into a liquid and we shoot it deep into a geologic formation where it just stays and it stays for eons.
Jacobson: What’s energizing you today? Like when you look out in the energy markets, what gets you excited?
Tiller: We were just talking about all this export, right, and reducing carbon intensity for our US energy project products that are exported.
But right here at home, we’re going to be developing a lot of new power projects. What we’re going to see right now, which we haven’t seen for decades, is new power plants coming online that are and at scale. Demand is going up for AI and for compute.
We’re going to see a whole lot more natural gas coming online. It’s interesting – the folks that are driving that, that are saying we need all this new power online, are companies like the hyperscalers. It’s Meta, Amazon or AWS, it’s Microsoft, it’s all these big tech companies that, by the way, have been doing a fantastic job of decarbonizing. Most of them are carbon neutral right now because they’ve been buying all the wind, because they’ve been buying all the solar. They’ve been using various kinds of ways to approach that market through virtual power purchase agreements and things like that.
But essentially, they’ve been taking a lot of the stock of the renewable energy that we’ve been developing. They are carbon neutral right now, but that’s today. They’re about to double their load or triple their load in in some cases. And we’re not going to be able to do solar and wind all alone fast enough to meet their demand.
Natural gas can do that. But we know they have a preference and a clarity of mind around wanting decarbonized electrons. And so natural gas plus carbon capture and storage really is the solution that that we see evolving. We think Carbonvert is well positioned to be in this space and participate in delivering these low carbon electrons.