- ExxonMobil and Chevron are exploring opportunities to provide power to meet the growing demand from energy-intensive AI data centers.
- Both companies are planning to build massive natural gas-fired power plants.
- The entry of ExxonMobil and Chevron into the power generation industry is driven by Big Tech’s rising appetite for electricity due to its emerging AI and other high-tech industries.
- Projections indicate that the emergence of AI data centers could make U.S. electricity demand in 2025 surge following two decades of stagnation.
(Natural News)—ExxonMobil and Chevron, two of the United States’ largest oil and gas companies, are exploring opportunities to enter the power generation business as Big Tech is looking for electricity suppliers for its growing number of energy-intensive data centers.
Both companies are considering leveraging natural gas-fired power plants equipped with carbon capture technology to meet the growing demand for low-carbon electricity.
ExxonMobil announced on Dec. 11 that it is designing a “massive” natural gas-fired power plant with a generating capacity of over 1,500 megawatts. ExxonMobil claims its facility, which would be dedicated to powering data centers, will capture more than 90 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions. The company emphasized that the project aims to address the short-term need for reliable electricity while minimizing emissions.
“There are very few opportunities in the short term to power those data centers and do it in a way that at the same time minimizes, if not completely eliminates, the emissions,” said ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods.
The company has secured land for the facility but has not disclosed its location or cost. ExxonMobil plans to operate the plant independently of the power grid, which could expedite the permitting and construction process. The plant is expected to be operational within the next five years. This would mark ExxonMobil’s first foray into power generation for external customers, as its previous gas-fired plants were built to serve its own operations.
Chevron, meanwhile, has been in discussions for over a year about supplying natural gas-fired power, coupled with carbon capture technologies, to data centers.
Jeff Gustavson, president of subsidiary Chevron New Energies, confirmed the company’s interest in the sector during an interview.
Gustavson highlighted Chevron’s experience in natural gas supply and power equipment operations as key advantages in meeting the growing demand for electricity from data centers.
“It fits many of our capabilities – natural gas, construction, operations, and being able to provide customers with a low-carbon pathway on power through CCUS (carbon capture, utilization and storage), geothermal, and maybe some other technologies,” said Gustavson.
Big Oil’s entry into power generation driven by demand to accommodate AI
Both companies are entering the power market amid a surge in electricity demand driven by the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and other high-tech industries.
Projections indicate that U.S. electricity demand could reach record highs by 2025, following two decades of stagnation. The urgency to meet this demand has prompted the power industry to invest in new natural gas infrastructure and delay the retirement of fossil-fuel power plants. Natural gas has emerged as a leading option for providing round-the-clock electricity, given its lower cost compared to other sources.
ExxonMobil has also been working with tech giant Intel to develop new liquid cooling technologies for data centers. The partnership aims to design energy-efficient cooling solutions that could reduce emissions and improve operational efficiency. The company has committed $30 billion over the next few years to these efforts, in addition to its plans to increase oil and gas production by 18 percent by 2030.
Chevron, similarly, is leveraging its expertise in natural gas and carbon capture to explore opportunities in the power generation sector. The company’s entry into the market would mark a significant shift from its traditional focus on oil and gas production.
Watch this clip from CNBC discussing how the construction of new AI data centers all over the world is fueling a boom in cooling technology to help prevent these data centers from overheating.
This video is from the TrendingNews channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
- OpenAI wants to build data centers that consume MORE POWER than the entire United Kingdom.
- Amazon investing more than half a billion dollars to build small modular nuclear reactors to power its AWS computing centers.
- Google backs construction of first small nuclear reactors to power AI data centers.
- Microsoft to bring infamous nuclear plant back to life to feed POWER HUNGRY AI data centers.
- Big Tech has a growing appetite for America’s electricity and water resources.
Sources include:
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
