Subject: OXY Petroleum and NetPower
This post is about OXY and its CO2 capture efforts. That is not particularly important to BRK’s OXY investment at this point, but could be in the future. So it's not totally off-topic.

OXY has generated a lot of publicity about its efforts to remove CO2 from air - DAC. I’ve expressed my doubts about that process in past posts. I won’t repeat them here. But they involve both the difficulty/cost of removing such a dilute amount of CO2 (400 ppm) combined with the complexity of their process. Their timetable seems overstated to me.

However, I’ve run across another process where OXY is involved that could be a lot more promising. They are the largest investor in a company called NetPower. NP is progressing a modified electricity power plant design that burns natural gas, but generates very low CO2 emissions.

The problem with existing natural gas power plants is the cost and difficulty of removing CO2 from the emissions stream. This is because of still low CO2 concentrations – few percent. When you burn natural gas with air, you’re taking in four times as much nitrogen as oxygen. This dilutes the stream driving the turbines and the effluent stream -it’s just along for the ride.

NetPower’s idea was to use pure oxygen for combustion, taking out the nitrogen beforehand in an air separation plant. This does two things. It permits much higher CO2 concentrations in the effluent gases. It also produces a CO2/H20 stream to drive the turbines rather than a CO2/H2O/N stream. This permits higher thermal efficiency, generating more electricity. This extra electricity is used to power the air separation plant. It is much lower cost to remove the CO2 from this high concentration CO2 effluent stream. The output from such a plant is comparable to the CO2 from renewable energy plus battery storage. Making batteries and building wind turbines generates CO2, so wind and solar are not CO2 free.

Since gas powered power plants can operate around the clock with fast startup/shutdown, they are necessary to balance the intermittent outputs from wind and solar. This low CO2 alternate would be very attractive to utilities.

Here is a easy to watch youtube link describing the process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And here is a link to a detailed presentation of the process:

https://tinyurl.com/dzeh3mr8

The NetPower process has been demonstrated in a large pilot plant in LaPorte Texas and the first commercial scale unit is being built at an OXY facility in Big Spring Texas.

There are always issues to be addressed in new technologies. One is the higher combustion temps from burning natural gas with pure oxygen can require design and material improvements to the power turbines. So there’s still work to be done.
But this process makes sense to me. And it could ultimately help the DAC OXY process. The latter requires a lot of energy. The NetPower process could be an attractive source of such energy down the road compared with wind and solar.

Just passing along something of indirect interest to BRK investors.