Chevron's risky new fossil fuel project
The oil giant wants to convince the public that its new ultra-high-pressure offshore drilling project, Anchor, is climate-friendly.
For a list of Hurricane Helene mutual aid resources, click here.
One day after Hurricane Helene dissipated, the Politico newsletter Power Switch ran a story detailing the terrifying nationwide implications of fossil-fueled storms.
“Nowhere is safe from climate disaster,” the headline roared. “Presented by Chevron,” the next line read.
What followed was a back-and-forth between Politico’s reporters and Chevron’s marketing team. For a few paragraphs, readers were given journalism about Helene’s astronomical human and economic toll. Then, they were given a break for a paid message about Chevron’s new “Anchor” project—an ultra-deepwater drilling endeavor that the oil giant claims will deliver “some of the world’s lowest carbon intensity oil and gas.
Chevron’s sponsorship in Politico was perhaps its most dystopian example of climate-focused advertising about the Anchor project in recent weeks, but it was far from the only one.
During Climate Week NYC—the annual event that brings together diplomats, politicians, activists and corporate leaders to talk climate solutions—Chevron placed Anchor ads in The New York Times, NPR, and sponsored the Axios climate newsletter. It also advertised Anchor across social media.
But what is the Anchor project, exactly, and why is Chevron marketing it to climate-focused audiences?
The $5.7 billion facility, located 140 miles off the coast of Louisiana, is the first time an oil company has cracked the code on how to drill in previously untouched, dangerously high pressure deep sea environments. The technological achievement, which took Chevron a decade, will allow the fossil fuel industry to reach underwater oil and gas fields up to 20,000 pounds per square inch pressures, a third greater than any prior well.
Chevron estimates that Anchor could produce up to 440 million barrels of oil over 30 years, roughly equal to 187 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the same amount of emissions as running 499 methane gas plants in one year. But those millions of barrels are only the beginning of the company’s ambition; Chevron hopes Anchor will pioneer a new type of oil production that could yield billions of gallons of oil and gas from ultra-high-pressure fields across the world.
Chevron’s ambition, however, is coming amid global calls for a massive societal transition away from fossil fuels. Scientists say such a transition is the only way to solve the worsening climate crisis, which is wreaking havoc on human health and the economy.
So in order to achieve its dream of unmitigated oil production, Chevron must sell the public on a ludicrous idea: that drilling deep into the ocean floor is a climate solution.
“Lower carbon” oil and gas
Even before the first barrel of oil was produced from Anchor on August 12, Chevron had spent at least $400,000 placing ads about it on social media and traditional news media, according to a HEATED analysis of data from ad insights firm Media Radar.
The amount is almost certainly an underestimation: Many of the Anchor ads currently on social media, podcasts, and other media outlets were not included in Media Radar’s data. A closer estimation may be the nearly $7 million the company has spent on ad placements over the past three months—outspending competitors like Shell and ExxonMobil by at least 50 percent.
The Anchor project media blitz, which has included press releases and interviews with executives, often claims that ultra-high-pressure deepwater fossil fuel projects are better for the planet than other fossil fuel projects.
“The Anchor project provides…lower carbon intensity oil and natural gas to help meet energy demand,” said Bruce Niemeyer, president of Chevron’s U.S. oil exploration and production, in a press release.
The claim rests in part on a simple fact: The Anchor project no longer uses diesel-powered rigs and fracking equipment, but uses electric-powered drilling rigs and fracking equipment instead.
“To reduce carbon emissions, the Anchor FPU was designed as an all-electric facility with electric motors and electronic controls,” its website reads. The oil giant also touts its re-use of waste heat and captured vapor to move oil and gas through existing pipelines, rather than constructing new ones.
Greenwashing experts told HEATED that these claims amount to paltering: they may be technically true, but purposefully obscure a larger picture. Yes, using electric rigs may make it less carbon-intensive to produce a barrel of oil. But since Chevron intends to use the new technology to produce even more oil and gas, any reductions would likely be offset, and Chevron would pollute even more than it does today. (The company is already one of the world’s biggest polluters, accounting for 3 percent of historic global greenhouse gas emissions).
“You can bring [the carbon intensity] down by a minuscule amount and still make that claim that it's cleaner than before,” said Wren Montgomery, an associate professor of sustainability at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “But they're trying to increase production. So overall, they're not actually reducing their carbon footprint even if they have made some small reduction per barrel.”
Chevron isn’t making these claims in isolation; other fossil fuel companies like BP and Exxon are also using bogus carbon-intensity marketing to justify increased production, while claiming to be tackling climate change.
But Montgomery says that Chevron’s ads, which simultaneously hype its new oil production while claiming that oil is better for the planet, are a sign of an industry hanging on by its fingernails as renewable energy continues to be cheaper than coal and gas.
“I see a lot of these as sort of grasping at straws,” she said. Fossil fuel companies are “driving for new audiences that will support them…so they can keep operating a little bit longer and not be shut down, which we all know is what needs to happen.”
The new frontier of deepwater drilling
Chevron’s “lower carbon” claims aren’t the only concern experts have with the Anchor project. Indeed, some say the entire new field of ultra-high-pressure drilling poses massive environmental risk.
All of Chevron’s ads take care to describe the Anchor project as “safe,” a claim backed up by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s environmental assessment. The BOEM concluded that offshore spills “are possible if an accident were to damage a storage tank onboard the offshore support vessels,” but said the agency’s oversight and Chevron’s safety precautions make it “reasonable to conclude that an accidental spill event is not likely to occur.”
But overshadowing any deepwater drilling project is the infamous rig that caused one of the worst marine oil spills in history: Deepwater Horizon.
Before Deepwater Horizon became synonymous with disaster, killing 11 people and releasing about 300 Olympic-swimming pools-worth of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, it successfully drilled the deepest oil and gas well at the time. Three years before it exploded, Deepwater Horizon was described as “one of the most powerful rigs in the world.”
Chevron’s Anchor project is drilling at pressures a third higher than Deepwater Horizon, where the margins for error are smaller. But for Big Oil, the reward is worth the risk because deeper wells produce more oil and gas.
Anchor’s seven deepsea wells sit 34,000 feet below sea level, where temperatures can hit 121 degrees Celsius and the pressure can reach up to 20,000 pounds per square inch. That subsurface pressure “is essentially equivalent to an elephant standing on a quarter,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth told CNBC.
The ultra-high-pressure technology is “a breakthrough for the energy industry” that “allows us to unlock previously difficult-to-access resources,” said Nigel Hearne, Chevron’s executive vice president, in a press release.
If successful, energy industry analysts told Reuters that the Anchor project could open the door to developing ultra-high pressure, deepwater oil fields around the world, including off the coasts of Brazil, Angola, and Nigeria. Access to new oil fields could also push the Gulf of Mexico’s fossil fuel production above its previous record output of 2019, according to the same analysts.
Altogether, the Anchor project’s technology could help tap more than 5 billion barrels of oil and gas globally. That’s roughly equivalent to a whopping 2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions, an amount so large that it is about equal to the emissions from all of South America and Africa, combined.
To say this new fossil fuel frontier is a significant threat to a livable climate is an understatement. The International Energy Agency warned in 2021 that all new fossil fuel developments must stop if the world wants to prevent the worst effects of climate change.
“There’s no way to make offshore drilling safe, and especially not projects like this one that involve drilling at such depths and under such high pressure,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, who sharply criticized the BOEM’s assessment. “And the further offshore oil and gas activities occur, the more difficult oil spill or other responses are, as the Deepwater Horizon disaster highlights all too well.”
The probability of a serious accident or explosion increases by 8.5 percent with each additional 100 feet of depth at which an offshore platform operates, according to a peer-reviewed analysis of fossil fuel production in the Gulf of Mexico. Offshore drilling also represents a risk to critically endangered species like Rice’s whales, and endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles.
“The project would also lock in decades of fossil fueled climate destruction from oil that should most definitely stay in the ground,” Monsell pointed out. “We need to be phasing drilling out of our oceans, not allowing oil companies to take drilling to risky new lows.”
Further reading:
Why Is the Oil Industry Booming? The New York Times, July 2024.
The industry’s revival after bruising losses during the Covid-19 pandemic is due largely to market forces, though Russia’s war in Ukraine has helped. U.S. oil prices have averaged around $80 a barrel since early 2021, compared with roughly $53 in the four years before that.
That the price and demand for oil have been so strong suggests that the shift to renewable energy and electric vehicles will take longer and be more bumpy than some climate activists and world leaders once hoped.
Offshore drilling has dug itself a deeper hole since Deepwater Horizon. The Verge, April 2020.
Today’s drilling rigs can work at depths more than twice as deep as Deepwater Horizon. Between 2000 and 2009, just 15 percent of oil production from US waters in the Gulf of Mexico came from ultra-deep operations like Deepwater Horizon. That proportion grew to 52 percent by 2017, and it likely won’t stop there.
The Biden administration sells oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. NPR, March 2023.
But the administration says it was compelled to open the huge swath of Gulf waters to drilling because of stipulations in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The budget act coalesced around a deal Democratic leaders reached with their conservative colleague Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, inserting requirements for new oil and gas leases.
Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours. The New York Times, December 2010.
For nine long minutes, as the drilling crew battled the blowout and gas alarms eventually sounded on the bridge, no warning was given to the rest of the crew. For many, the first hint of crisis came in the form of a blast wave.
The paralysis had two main sources, the examination by The Times shows. The first was a failure to train for the worst. The Horizon was like a Gulf Coast town that regularly rehearsed for Category 1 hurricanes but never contemplated the hundred-year storm. The crew members, though expert in responding to the usual range of well problems, were unprepared for a major blowout followed by explosions, fires and a total loss of power.
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Great reporting and article! It's clear that until there is a price on climate pollution that is high enough to make fossil fuels uncompetitive, we will continue to see innovation and investment in the destruction of our future.
It's time to close the growing US carbon price gap with an equitable policy and push our carbon price around the world with a CBAM.
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After reading this, it is becoming obvious that the fossil fuel industry is on a hairs edge of a major disaster. Lots of dead people and marine life. And for what? To make a handful of executives richer than they already are? As green energy starts really taking a hold of the world, these companies will risk it all in order to keep these wealthy elitists fat, dumb and happy.