ELK HILLS, California — Oil company executives joined labor leaders, a climate regulator and both Republican and Democrat local elected officials in California’s oil fields Thursday to ceremonially break ground on the state’s first commercial project to bury climate-warming carbon emissions deep underground.
The groundbreaking is a high-stakes experiment in California’s bid to prove that large-scale carbon capture and storage can work not only in Texas and Louisiana, current hot spots for the technology, but also in environmentally conscious blue states that acknowledge they need the help to meet aggressive emissions targets.
“The world is coming to grips with the fact that we cannot completely decarbonize quickly,” said Dave Noerr, the mayor of nearby city of Taft, at the event. “This is the proving ground. This is the opportunity.”
For California Resources Corp., the state’s largest oil producer, which is building TerraVault 1 with investment firm Brookfield Corp., it’s also a business bet: that the company can survive — and even thrive — in a state steadily moving away from fossil fuels.
