It’s easy to stereotype Big Oil companies (BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, and others) as old-school oil and gas producers, with a long history of pushing dirty, greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels. Because of the size and scope of their operations, Big Oil companies are often targeted by environmental detractors as primary contributors to global warming.
However, the caricature of major oil companies as relentless polluters is unfair. All the Big Oil firms have made commitments to renewable energy, headlined by BP’s Beyond Petroleum marketing strategy. Earlier this year Linda Cook, Shell’s executive director of gas and power, stated that while Shell does indeed plan to build a material business in alternative energy, wind power and solar power were no longer in favor in the Shell boardroom. Shell’s future in the green energy business would be in biofuels and carbon capture processes, and in improving environmental protections in fossil fuel production. In 2008 Shell pulled out of the 1,000 MW London Array project, scheduled to be built in the Thames Estuary. The joint venture (with E.ON) had planned what would be the world’s largest offshore wind farm.
But the company knows that alternative energy, or at least an alternative approach to energy, is in its future. Shell has predicted that by 2025, 80% of the world’s energy supply will come from fossil fuels and 20% from alternative energy sources. What it wants to do is make sure that it bets on the green sources and strategies that make the most sense in the context of its overall business model. It plans to concentrate on developing cleaner ways of using fossil fuels, such as carbon capture and sequestration technology, processes that would help reduce carbon emissions from its big oil sands developments in northern Canada.
Shell has a global subsidiary dedicated to the proposition that cleaner burning fossil fuels are a key strategy in reducing carbon emissions, and, given the preponderance of fossil fuels, may in the short term be more important than noncarbon-based fuel development. Shell Global Solutions International coordinates the operations of half a dozen of Shell technology businesses worldwide focused on making downstream manufacturing, downstream marketing, and gas and LNG production more efficient and less polluting. The company claims that the structured energy efficiency programs it conducts with its customers save 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year and 0.3 million tons of fuel.
Practicing what it preaches, in 2000 Shell launched a multi-billion dollar program to halt continuous flaring from its oil and gas platforms around the world (capturing and using the trapped carbon emissions). By the end of 2008, flaring was basically limited to Nigeria, and Shell’s total flaring worldwide was down 70% from 2001.
Cleaner fossil fuels, might not be better that green fuels, but they are surely and improvement on dirty fossil fuels. Seems like a good alternative to me.
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Stuart — Exxon is well known for funding bogus “science” claiming global warming is a hoax and subverting efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions. Putting a price on dumping carbon in the atmosphere would go along way toward making a sustainable energy future economically viable, which firms like Exxon have subverted at every turn despite their investments in alternatives.
The use of algae to convert CO2 into oxygen and carbon based life forms for food, feed and fertilizer purposes, is a growing and encouraging process that will result in truly clean fossil fuel energy. Very cool stuff.