A company research product is looking at using cloud-computing power and AI to design materials that capture carbon dioxide
IBM President Jim Whitehurst, shown when he was Red Hat chief executive in 2019.
PHOTO: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWSInternational Business Machines Corp. is betting that its own research can speed along emerging technologies like carbon capture to meet the last stretch of its new net-zero climate-change goal.
“We’re not going to be in the business of capturing carbon, but we are in the business of working with companies to invent those technologies,” IBM President James Whitehurst said in an interview.
The Armonk, N.Y.-based information-technology company and patent giant said Tuesday that it aims to reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, with a target of 65% lower emissions by 2025 from 2010 levels. It said it would use 75% renewable electricity by 2025 and 90% by 2030. Most of IBM’s carbon footprint comes from its data centers. By 2030, data centers are expected to take up more than 10% of the world’s electricity use, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Challenges.
“Without a doubt, we are relying on some technologies that don’t exist yet,” Mr. Whitehurst said. “The reason we feel confident in doing that is we are at the center of helping develop those technologies.”
Mr. Whitehurst, former chief executive of open-source software company Red Hat Inc., now heads IBM’s cloud-computing and cognitive-software businesses after the company bought Red Hat for some $33 billion in 2019.
In January, IBM joined a dozen other companies—including Apple Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Boeing Co. —as the inaugural members of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium to develop technologies to combat climate change.
That builds on IBM’s “future of climate” research project launched in the past year, which aims to use cloud computing and machine learning to design materials that help capture carbon dioxide at polluting sites like refineries or even suck it out of the air. The technology also got a boost earlier this month when Exxon Mobil Corp. said it would spend $3 billion on carbon capture and other technologies through 2025.
Mr. Whitehurst also ruled out carbon offset credits, a climate-change currency that funds emission-reduction projects such as paying timberland owners to leave trees standing and capturing methane fumes at hog farms. Each carbon credit equals one ton of CO2, with the price for California offset credits averaging $13.79 during the third quarter of last year.
“We need to reach carbon neutrality without, frankly, writing a check to offset emissions,” Mr. Whitehurst said. He said he was previously involved in buying carbon credits when he was chief operating officer at Delta Air Lines Inc.
Investors and companies have flocked to carbon credits as more companies pledge net-zero emissions, increasing demand for the offsets. Exchange operator CME Group Inc. said it would launch carbon-credit futures contracts on March 1.
Mr. Whitehurst said he expects carbon capture and other technologies will develop fast enough in the coming years so IBM can avoid buying credits to offset the last of its emissions.
“I don’t have any announcements on exactly how to get there, but I know we are very far along in working around material science to try to make those breakthroughs,” he said.
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