Exxon Mobil's Low Carbon business has the potential to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue and outperform the company's traditional oil and gas business as soon as a decade from now, CEO Darren Woods said.
The largest US oil producer laid out to investors the aims of its emerging energy transition strategy in a meeting with Wall Street. Exxon is tackling what should be a multitrillion-dollar market in 10 years or more, Woods said.
The result will be an Exxon less prone to commodity price swings through predictable, long-term contracts with customers striving to reduce their own carbon footprint.
"This business is going to look quite a bit different than the base business of Exxon Mobil," said Dan Ammann, president of Exxon's 2-year-old Low Carbon Business Solutions unit. "It is going to have a much more stable, or less cyclical, profile."
How quickly that vision becomes a reality will depend on regulatory and policy support for carbon pricing — something the US has not broadly accepted — and the cost to abate greenhouse-gas emissions, among other changes, he said.