FRANKFURT, March 1 (Reuters) – Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSa.L) Chief Executive Peter Voser defended the oil giant’s retreat from some green technologies to concentrate on oil and gas production in an interview with the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Shell withdrew from its solar business because it was not prepared to make the required investments, Voser told the newspaper adding that alternative fuel for cars remained problematic.
Voser said Shell was investing between 20 percent and 25 percent of its research budget into biofuels, an area where the company still sees potential.
But Voser cautioned that second generation biofuels will take years before they become viable arriving on markets, “late this decade…if at all.”
Biofuels, hybrid technology and electric cars still faced difficult technological hurdles, and may even cause other problems, the Swiss chief executive said.
“In the next 40 years, the number of vehicles in the world will double,” he said.
Demand, he said, will come mainly from Asia, where many polluting coal fired power stations generate electricity, there could be a step backward from an environmental standpoint.
Voser said he does not expect massive growth for oil demand in the short-term. “Because 2010 is a difficult year for the world economy, particularly the second half, when stimulus measures come to an end,” he said.
“We will probably also continue at a slow pace in to 2011. But in the medium term, global demand for oil and gas will rise.”
(Reporting by Edward Taylor, Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
© Thomson Reuters 2010 All rights reserved.
Shell Blog RSS Feed
on Mar 2nd, 2010 at 11:20 am
Tom Peters seminal book “In Scarce of Excellence” was first published in 1982 and in it there were eight themes for success in business one of was “Stick to the knitting” – i.e. stay with the business that you know. It has taken Shell quite a while to acknowledge Tom Peters’ truism – ironically as there is no major corporation which has made more of a mess of diversification than Shell. Along the way there have been failed ventures in Coal, Mining, Nuclear Power, Electricity Generation, Forestry, Wind Power, Solar, Convenience Stores, Home insulation…
Take the eye of the ball to try and manage things for which you have no corporate memory and no distinctive competences and not only will you not make these things work – but you will also damage the core businesses. But the really venal behaviour was when so much of Shell’s corporate advertising was focused on the essentially trivial “Renewables” sector. Now Shell has come clean (!) and essentially walked away from this segment entirely. Biofuel has always been an interesting sector and there is a long history of biofuel use in some of Shell’s markets – especially Brazil. But in the main Shell has at last decide to “stick to its knitting” – and about time to!