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Exxon Mobil and Chevron These two companies are jumping into the race to operate artificial intelligence data centers, with the two oil majors betting that technology companies will eventually turn to natural gas to meet their massive energy needs.
Exxon Exposed plans This week to build a natural gas plant to power the data center. The oil major says it will then use carbon capture and storage technology to reduce the plant’s emissions by 90%.
“We are working with other large industrial companies to rapidly deploy a solution that will provide high reliability, low-carbon intensity power to meet the growing demand for AI computing power,” Exxon Chief Financial Officer Katherine Mikels told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday. Without revealing the names of the companies that the major oil company is working with on the project.
The gas plant will not depend on the electric grid and will be independent of utilities, allowing it to be installed faster than traditional power generation projects, Mikels said. Exxon did not reveal a client or timeline for the project.
Exxon 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 several industrial customers to permanent storage sites. The oil major estimates that decarbonizing AI data centers could account for up to 20% of its total addressable market for carbon capture and storage by 2050.
Chevron is also working on ways to power data centers, Jeff Gustafson, head of the oil company’s new energy business, said at the Reuters Next conference on Wednesday.
“This is something our company is very well positioned to participate in,” Gustafson said. Chevron is a major national gas producer and has power generation equipment and very large amounts of land that could be used for data centers, the executive said.
Gas on nuclear
alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and dead It has primarily purchased wind and solar power for its data centers as it seeks to mitigate its business’s climate impact. But AI’s energy needs are growing so much that technology companies are looking for more reliable sources of electricity than renewable energy.
As a result, technology companies have shown increasing interest in nuclear energy. Microsoft is helping to bring the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor back online by purchasing power from the plant. Amazon’s Google unit and Alphabet Inc’s Google unit are investing in the next generation of small nuclear reactors. Meta recently invited companies to send it proposals to build new nuclear plants.
But the fossil fuel industry and energy analysts have argued for months that the technology sector will eventually have to embrace natural gas because nuclear plants take too long to build.
Exxon CEO Darren Woods criticized nuclear power on Wednesday, claiming his company is better positioned than any in the United States to meet AI’s immediate and near-term energy needs.
“If you’re betting on nuclear and something is coming down the road, there’s a long way to go,” Woods told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday. Small nuclear reactors invested by technology companies are not expected to reach the stage of commercialization before the 2030s.
The CEO said Exxon is not looking to start a power generation business. Woods said the company plans to use its experience leading large projects to help install power generation for data centers in the early stages of AI ramp-up.
Once early ramp-up is complete, Exxon will focus on capturing and storing emissions associated with data centers, and providing carbon-free natural gas to power plants that power artificial intelligence, Woods said.
