clean team

Baker Hughes launches major clean energy initiatives with U.S. military and more

Baker Hughes has teamed up with Dallas-based Frontier Infrastructure and has been selected by the U.S. Air Force and the Department of Defense for global clean energy projects. Photo via bakerhughes.com.

Energy tech company Baker Hughes announced two major clean energy initiatives this month.

The Houston-based company has teamed up with Dallas-based Frontier Infrastructure to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS), power generation and data center operations in the U.S.

Baker Hughes will supply technology for Frontier’s nearly 100,000-acre CCS hub in Wyoming, which will provide open-access CO2 storage for manufacturers and ethanol producers, as well as future Frontier projects. Frontier has already begun drilling activities at the Wyoming site.

“Baker Hughes is committed to delivering innovative solutions that support increasing energy demand, in part driven by the rapid adoption of AI, while ensuring we continue to enable the decarbonization of the industry,” says Lorenzo Simonelli, chairman and CEO of Baker Hughes.

Additionally, Baker Hughes announced this week that it was selected by the U.S. Air Force and the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) to develop utility-scale geothermal power plants that would power global U.S. military bases.

Baker Hughes was granted an "awardable," or eligible, status through the CDAO's Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace, which aims to accelerate "mission-critical technologies," including AI, machine learning and resilient energy technologies. The potential geothermal plants would provide cost-effective electricity, even during a grid outage.

“The ability of geothermal to provide reliable, secure baseload power makes it an ideal addition to America’s energy mix,” Ajit Menon, vice president of geothermal, oilfield services and equipment at Baker Hughes, said in a news release. “Baker Hughes has been a pioneer in this field for more than 40 years and our unique subsurface-to-surface expertise and advanced technology across the geothermal value chain will help the U.S. military unlock this critical domestic energy source, while simultaneously driving economic growth and energy independence.”

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Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental, said the company's Stratos DAC project is on track to begin capturing CO2 later this year. Photo via 1pointfive.com

Houston-based Occidental Petroleum is gearing up to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere at its $1.3 billion direct air capture (DAC) project in the Midland-Odessa area.

Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental, said during the company’s recent second-quarter earnings call that the Stratos project — being developed by carbon capture and sequestration subsidiary 1PointFive — is on track to begin capturing CO2 later this year.

“We are immensely proud of the achievements to date and the exceptional record of safety performance as we advance towards commercial startup,” Hollub said of Stratos.

Carbon dioxide captured by Stratos will be stored underground or be used for enhanced oil recovery.

Oxy says Stratos is the world’s largest DAC facility. It’s designed to pull 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air and either store it underground or use it for enhanced oil recovery. Enhanced oil recovery extracts oil from unproductive reservoirs.

Most of the carbon credits that’ll be generated by Stratos through 2030 have already been sold to organizations such as Airbus, AT&T, All Nippon Airways, Amazon, the Houston Astros, the Houston Texans, JPMorgan, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and TD Bank.

The infrastructure business of investment manager BlackRock has pumped $550 million into Stratos through a joint venture with 1PointFive.

As it gears up to kick off operations at Stratos, Occidental is also in talks with XRG, the energy investment arm of the United Arab Emirates-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., to form a joint venture for the development of a DAC facility in South Texas. Occidental has been awarded up to $650 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to build the South Texas DAC hub.

The South Texas project, to be located on the storied King Ranch, will be close to industrial facilities and energy infrastructure along the Gulf Coast. Initially, the roughly 165-square-mile site is expected to capture 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, with the potential to store up to 3 billion metric tons of CO2 per year.

“We believe that carbon capture and DAC, in particular, will be instrumental in shaping the future energy landscape,” Hollub said.

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