As the race picks up to meet the massive energy needs of data centres behind the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, ExxonMobil and Chevron are looking to grab a slice of the action. The US oil majors are making tentative inroads into the electricity business with early plans to build natural gas-fired power plants twinned with carbon capture technology to trap the emissions produced.
Electricity demand in the US is soaring as technology giants scramble to power data centres. While wind and solar have a role to play, small nuclear reactors have been touted as one solution to meet the expected huge ramp-up in demand, but they are at least a decade away. That leaves natural gas to fill the gap and opens the door to companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, which have prior experience of developing power projects to run their own operations.
"What we know from Big Tech is that they all have carefully crafted sustainability roadmaps," bank Raymond James' investment strategy analyst, Pavel Molchanov, says. "That means they need to balance this insatiable need for electricity with lower emissions. And carbon capture can be a very elegant solution to do exactly that." The majors see themselves as having an inbuilt advantage in being able to get large-scale infrastructure projects off the ground in a timely fashion. Any power plants they end up building could be located next to data centres, without having to rely on an already overburdened grid. "It's project management, it's supply chain development and sort of having a vertically integrated approach," Molchanov says. "These companies absolutely have that skill set."
Unlike their European peers, ExxonMobil and Chevron have mostly shied away from renewable power on the grounds that the returns are too low and they have little expertise in this field. Instead, their low-carbon goals have focused on technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), which play to core strengths. Adding such a component to gas-fired plants gives them an opportunity to showcase this preferred strategy. That was a point hammered home by ExxonMobil chief executive Darren Woods at last month's strategy update, when he maintained that the company still has little interest in getting into the power business as such. "We don't bring a lot of value creation to the power generation step, in and of itself," Woods said. "It's the ability to provide decarbonised natural gas to that power system, and the ability to capture the CO2 and then to transport it and sequester it, where we bring the value."
Generation X factor
Initial engineering and design work is already under way on such a project, ExxonMobil chief financial officer Kathy Mikells said. "The customer feedback has been incredibly encouraging," she added. ExxonMobil plans to trap more than 90pc of the CO2 from the plant's operations, and will tap its vast network of CO2 pipelines and sequestration sites — acquired as part of the $4.9bn acquisition of Denbury in 2023 — to transport and permanently store the emissions underground.
Chevron chief executive Mike Wirth said recently that his company has been "deeply engaged" in conversations with the various hyperscalers involved in the buildout of data centres and in developing new AI tools. "America is blessed with an abundance of natural gas, and I think you're going to see a buildout of natural gas fired power generation that will support these data centres," he added. "We're certainly working on ideas like that."
Surging demand from AI and data centres will play a part in supporting the investment case for the oil and gas industry for the remainder of the decade, according to the world's leading oil services contractor SLB. "AI is the X factor for our industry," SLB chief executive Oliver Le Peuch says.