By Emily Pickrell, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published Thursday, January 12, 2012

Shell Oil Co. expects to clear remaining regulatory hurdles and begin drilling later this year in the Chukchi Sea near Alaska, company President Marvin Odum said at a scientific conference on Thursday.

Shell received conditional federal approval last month to drill six exploratory wells in the Arctic offshore region but still must secure permits for individual wells.

Among the requirements for Shell to obtain those permits will be selling regulators on its plan for responding to spills or other accidents at the sites.

Odum said Shell is mindful of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and the wide criticism BP and others involved received for the conditions leading to the accident and their response.

“We will have every piece of response in Alaska available on a one-hour notice,” Odum said in a keynote address at the ninth conference of the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas.

“The access to the equipment will provide for a much different response than what the world watched in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Environmentalists who oppose the drilling contend that no proven technology exists for cleaning up a spill in the slushy Arctic environment.

The area about 70 miles off the Alaska coast is more remote than the Gulf, and winter ice causes additional challenges.

Odum noted, however, that the drilling will be in about 150 feet of water – far shallower than the well under a mile of water that blew out in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

He said that Shell is also working with Norwegian experts on how best to clean up any potential spills in colder climates.

On another subject, Odum predicted that Shell will soon get into the gas-to-liquids business in the U.S., with plants similar to its $20 billion Pearl plant in Qatar, which converts natural gas to liquid transportation fuel.

“With very low natural gas prices, we have a market that still has to import much of its liquid fuels,” Odum said. “It is high time to do something like that in the U.S.”

A view of the wind

In another panel Thursday, Shell Wind Energy President Richard Williams presented an optimistic view of the opportunities in wind.

“Everyone asks us if a wind farm makes money,” Williams said. “The answer is yes.”

The cost of turbine construction has decreased about 30 percent, and installation costs have gone down about 10 percent, Williams said, while improvements in safety and additional technical education programs have made it easier to find and train employees to run wind farms.

Odum emphasized, however, that while Shell is continuing to explore opportunities in renewable energy, growing demand will mean continued reliance on oil and natural gas.

“Thirty percent of global energy could come from alternatives to oil and gas, but at the same time, the world will need twice as much energy as today,” Odum said.

emily.pickrell@chron.com

SOURCE ARTICLE

Updated: 2011-11-09

By Peter Voser (China Daily)

Coordinated global response is needed to meet challenge of providing more energy for more people and cutting CO2

Our world reached a significant milestone on Oct 31 when a mother gave birth to the Earth’s 7 billionth inhabitant. At this rate, the Earth will be home to more than 9 billion people by 2050 a number with an enormous potential impact on the global demand for energy, water and food.

Planning wisely for the future energy needs of this huge population is one of the most important challenges our generation faces, in part because it is far more than just an energy issue. Our future energy challenge is also a global security issue, an environmental issue, an economic issue and a jobs issue.

The global energy system is already in the early stages of a fundamental transformation. The future will see expanded use of renewable energy and cleaner fossil fuels. We will have more energy choices, but those choices will be more costly, so we will all have to become smarter about using energy efficiently.

Despite the scale of the challenge, I’m confident human ingenuity and technological innovation can make it happen. But what is lacking today is the common will to act. Getting where we need to go will require a new level of leadership and global collaboration on multiple fronts.

But the leadership triangle of government, business and society is increasingly ineffective. We need to rekindle the spirit of global cooperation and leadership that helped us deal with past challenges.

Simply put, our challenge is to produce far more energy for a world with far more people. At the same time, we need to reduce CO2 emissions and get smarter about how we extract and use our resources. And we will need to do this against a backdrop of almost constant volatility and change.

A big part of a broader global energy mix will be the rapidly expanding contribution of renewable energy resources. Up to 30 percent of the world’s energy mix could come from renewables by 2050. But that target assumes a very rapid growth rate that will require significant effort and sustained investment.

Even if the world achieves this target, all forms of energy will need to be developed to meet the future demand.

Among fossil fuels, natural gas will play an increasingly important role. It is the cleanest burning and the best ally of wind and solar power, which need a highly flexible backup.

Natural gas is also an ideal alternative to coal-fired power plants, emitting 50 to 70 percent less CO2. Replacing coal with gas to produce electricity is, by far, the fastest and least expensive way for the world to reduce CO2 emissions in the energy sector. Gas is affordable, its resource base is vast and widely dispersed, and it can help diversify energy supplies all of which enhance energy security.

It is also important that we focus on the ways in which water, energy and food are interconnected. Water is used to produce nearly all forms of energy energy is used to move and treat water, and energy and water are used to produce food. There is a growing awareness that the path to a more sustainable energy future will require society to balance the needs of these systems, while at the same time, keeping sight of carbon emissions and other resource stresses.

At Shell we have brought together specialists from various fields to map the links and better understand the trade-offs. Our early findings have identified two important factors that could help avoid a future water-energy-food crisis: smart urban development and greenhouse gas regulation and pricing.

Cities today hold half of the world’s population and generate up to 80 percent of its CO2 emissions. The global urban proportion is expected to grow to 75 percent by 2050. So the way in which our cities develop will greatly affect energy and water demand.

Through more efficient public transport, energy-efficient buildings and designs that utilize waste heat as an efficient energy source, and through investing heavily to upgrade our infrastructure, we can offset some of the growth in energy demand while creating new jobs.

But what is still urgently needed is a global consensus on greenhouse gas regulation and pricing. Widespread adoption of the most cost-effective CO2 reduction measures will only occur when governments promote frameworks to price CO2.

It brings us back to the need for leadership and global collaboration.

The absence of coherent energy policies among some of our largest energy-consuming nations and regions is a direct result of the lack of leadership and, more broadly, a troubling lack of basic trust between business, government and society.

Rather than choosing winners and losers, governments should set the goals and then provide appropriate incentives that let the market determine the most effective solutions.

I’m optimistic we will meet this challenge, as there are past examples of global leadership that offer hope. The coordinated response to the 2008 financial crisis is one. The international agreement to ban substances blamed for depleting the ozone layer is another.

Today we have a major opportunity to address the energy challenge in a way that avoids unnecessary pain in the future. Let’s not waste it.

The author is chief executive officer of Royal Dutch Shell. The article is based on a speech he delivered on Oct 31 to the Singapore Energy Summit.

(China Daily 11/09/2011 page8)

SOURCE ARTICLE

New ways to extract oil and natural gas could buy the U.S. some time to develop renewable energy. Or they could keep us addicted to dirty fuels.

INTRODUCTION

For renewable energy, even the successes can reveal how much work remains to be done: huge amounts of hydroelectric and wind power in the Pacific Northwest sometimes threaten to overwhelm the grid. So is it good news that recent approaches to drilling have created a boom for fossil fuels?

Companies can now extract oil and natural gas from the high Arctic, shale, oil sands and deepwater wells. These fossil fuels are still finite and dwindling, but tapping the new sources pushes back the date of “peak oil.” Does that give the United States necessary time to develop sustainable energy sources, or will it keep Americans needlessly addicted to dirty fuels by keeping them cheap — and eroding the “energy security” argument?

Cheap Gas Is a Trap

Updated November 6, 2011, 07:00 PM

Matthew Kotchen is a professor of environmental economics and policy at Yale University.

New and efficient technologies for extracting oil and natural gas are increasing the supply of both fuels from North America. But the consequences will be different for oil than for natural gas. Oil is traded in a highly integrated world market, and the relatively small increases in North American oil will have virtually no effect on prices. The result is that our demand for oil will remain unaffected by the change in supply, though we may take comfort in knowing that more of the oil we use is produced closer to home.

Natural gas is a different story. The markets are far less integrated, so the increase in domestic supply will lower prices and increase demand. We will have more households switching from oil to natural gas for heating, and we will have relatively more electricity generated with natural gas than with coal. The lower prices will be a good thing for consumers paying their utility bills, and there will be health and environmental benefits because natural gas is a relatively clean fuel.

But more and cheaper natural gas does not help our prospects for bolstering renewable sources of energy, including solar, wind and biomass. History has shown repeatedly that nothing is worse for renewable energy — and the policies that support it — than cheap and abundant conventional energy. Without the urgency of high fuel prices, the United States has never sustained meaningful private and public investment in the technological innovation and deployment of renewables.

We should do our best to make sure this time is different. There has been meaningful investment — both public and private — in recent years, and despite our current economic challenges, it would be a mistake to turn back these efforts. Also, we must not throw out the baby with the bath water in response to the Solyndra bankruptcy. Instead, it is critical that we find ways to do better with the right economic incentives.

The expansion of oil and natural gas supplies in North America changes little about our long-term energy challenges. Beyond the growing demand for energy worldwide, climate change is an increasingly important and closely related problem. Conventional sources of energy generate greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming. While the burning of natural gas generates fewer emissions than oil and coal, its emissions are nevertheless substantial — and extraction using hydraulic fracturing raises other environmental concerns.

Renewable sources of energy provide a leading alternative, and we need a sustained commitment to improving these technologies with the aim of making them cost competitive. Indeed, it should be concerning that China is doing exactly this while we in the U.S. watch our former leadership in renewable energy continue to erode.

SOURCE ARTICLE

Debaters

RELATED

• A Reality Check on Renewables

  Amy Myers Jaffe, co-author of “Oil, Dollars, Debt and Crises”

• An Outmoded Strategy

  Peter Lehner, Natural Resources Defense Council

• Oil Isn’t Scarce. It’s Just Wasted.

  Lisa Margonelli, New America Foundation

BUSINESS CHINA

11 Oct 2011

Published: Sept. 23, 2011 at 8:22 AM

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Brunei, Sept. 23 (UPI) — Natural gas resources will help fuel economic growth in Asia, where advances are vastly outpacing the rest of the world, a Shell executive said.

Malcolm Brinded, executive director for upstream developments at Shell, spoke to delegates at an energy conference in Brunei.

He said advancing economies in Asia, coupled with the energy deficit brought on by Japan’s nuclear power disaster, means the region needs to “invest heavily” in all resources, including solar and wind.

Beijing is moving to include more renewable energy on the national grid. The country set a goal of increasing its solar power capacity significantly in the next five years.

Brinded noted, however, that conventional resources like oil and natural gas will continue to dominate the global energy mix.

“Natural gas will not just be a reliable and abundant fuel for Asia’s remarkable economic growth,” he said. “As the cleanest burning fossil fuel, it can also make an immediate impact in cushioning the environmental impact of the region’s rising energy consumption.”

This week, Howard Gruenspecht, acting administrator at the U.S. Energy Information Administration, said top energy consumer China is expected to use 68 percent more energy than the United States within the next quarter century.

The EIA said the expected increase in world energy consumption by 53 percent by 2035 to be driven largely by economic growth in China and India.

In a 2009 report on Brazil, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, mister James Anaya, wrote that Mato Grosso do Sul “has the highest rate of indigenous children’s death due to precarious conditions of health and access to water and food, related to lack of lands.”

From pages 22, 23 & 24 of “Royal Dutch Shell and its sustainability troubles” – Background report to the Erratum of Shell’s Annual Report 2010

The report is made on behalf of Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands)
Author: Albert ten Kate: May 2011.

Joint venture with Brazil’s largest sugar and ethanol producer

On 25 August 2010, Royal Dutch Shell and the Brazilian sugar and ethanol producer Cosan S.A. have signed binding agreements to form a joint venture in Brazil. The definite formation of the joint venture is expected to occur in the first half of 2011. The name of the joint venture will be Raízen. “Due to the size of its operations, Raízen will help sugarcane ethanol, a sustainable, clean and renewable source of energy, to consolidate itself worldwide and strengthen Brazil‘s position in the international biofuels trading business,” stated its appointed Chief Executive Officer, Vasco Dias.

Cosan is Brazil’s largest sugar and ethanol producer, accounting for about 10 percent of Brazilian production. Ethanol made from sugarcane has become the most popular fuel for cars in Brazil, surpassing gasoline. Cosan is the world’s fourth largest ethanol producer and probably the world’s largest ethanol producer from sugarcane.

The deal calls for Cosan to transfer its units for sugar and ethanol production, fuel distribution and energy generation to the venture. Shell will contribute its retail fuel and aviation fuel distribution business, and its participation in the biomass technology companies Iogen Energy and Codexis.

After state oil giant Petrobras, the proposed joint venture competes with Ipiranga, a unit of Brazil’s Grupo Ultra, to become the second-largest fuel retailer in Brazil. In the fuel area, the joint venture will sell approximately 20 billion litres of fuels to the transportation and industry markets and to its network of over 4,500 retail sites.

All Cosan’s 24 sugarcane producing mills are located in the South-Central region of Brazil: 22 mills are located in São Paulo state, one in Jataí city (Goiás state) and one in Caarapó city (Mato Grosso do Sul state).

Brazil’s sugarcane plantations are located in the South-Central and North-eastern regions. These regions account for 89% and 11% of Brazilian production, respectively. Within the South-central region most is grown within São Paulo state.

Some of Cosan’s assets will not be included into the joint venture: the lubricant businesses; the sugar logistics business called Rumo Logistica; the land prospecting and development business called Radar Propriedades Agricolas, the food retail brands Da Barra, Uniao and other minor brands.

Sourcing sugarcane from occupiers of indigenous land

Since June 2009, Cosan owns a newly-built sugarcane plant in Caarapó, Mato Grosso do Sul state. Presently, the plant has a capacity to crush 2.5 million tonnes of sugarcane a year.120 The former owner has expected that the capacity will be over 6 million tonnes in 2017/2018. The plant is included into the Shell-Cosan joint venture plans, so soon it will be half owned by Shell.

To supply the Caarapó plant, Cosan sources mostly from new sugarcane plantations in the neighbourhood. One of its known sourcing areas are the farmlands of the Santa Claudina farm. This farm is located within the indigenous territory Guyraroká of the Guarani-Kaiowá Indians. The federal public prosecutor in Mato Grosso do Sul stated in May 2010 that Cosan’s purchase of raw materials from indigenous areas demonstrates its lack of social and environmental criteria for selecting suppliers, and disrespect for the second largest indigenous population of the country. The Santa Claudina farm is owned by a state representative of Mato Grosso do Sul, Zé Teixeira. Cosan has confirmed that one of its suppliers operates in the region.

According to satellite images of the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE), sugarcane plantations occupy already half of the indigenous territory Guyraroká. Since there are 26 “owners” of farmland within Guyraroká, there could be more suppliers to Cosan.

The indigenous territory Guyraroká, comprising over 11.000 hectares, was traditionally occupied by Guarani-Kaiowá Indians. According to the Brazilian constitution and United Nations conventions the land is theirs.

In October 2009, the Brazilian Ministry of Justice produced a directive as a step forward to final demarcation. The next steps for the Ministry are the administrative demarcation of the area and the withdrawal of the current occupants of the area. A signature by the Brazilian President, Ms Dilma Rousseff, is needed to make the demarcation definite. Generally, however, the demarcation process moves at a very slow pace. Moreover, the current occupants of the land are not likely to leave without resistance, be it in court or in the area itself. Violence by land occupiers and discrimination against the Guarani-Kaiowá Indians are frequently performed in Mato Grosso do Sul state.

Guyraroká is just one of the indigenous territories within the Central-South region of Mato Grosso do Sul, that has experienced serious delays in being demarcated. Dozens of Guarani-Kaiowá groups are waiting for their right to plots of land. Some 30,000 Guarani-Kaiowá live in Mato Grosso do Sul state. In the past they were pushed off their land and into reservations. Today, these reservations are severely overcrowded. The communities subsist mainly on government food aid. According to the federal public prosecutor of Mato Grosso do Sul, Dr Marco Antonio Delfino de Almeida, “the demography is comparable to being imprisoned in spaces so small that social, economic and cultural life are impossible to sustain.” In a 2009 report on Brazil, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, mister James Anaya, wrote that Mato Grosso do Sul “has the highest rate of indigenous children’s death due to precarious conditions of health and access to water and food, related to lack of lands.”

Sugarcane plantations are arising rapidly in Mato Grosso do Sul. The state area cultivated for sugarcane harvest amounted to 502,000 hectares during the 2010/11 season. For the 2005/06 season the figure stood at 160,000 hectares. Both Cosan and the Brazilian government havosane identified the Central-South region of Mato Grosso do Sul as one of the main areas for future growth. This is the same area as where dozens of different Guarani-Kaiowá groups are claiming plots of land.

A further extract from this section of the report will be published in the coming days:

“Cosan’s short-lived inclusion into the “dirty list” of slave labour”

THE COMPLETE 73 PAGE REPORT (with reference sources)

Shell says it would invest billions of dollars in the development of a Karoo gas field in the event that it got the go- ahead to drill and if its exploration of the area proved fruitful

LINDA ENSOR
Published: 2011/09/02 06:49:50 AM

CAPE TOWN — Shell would invest billions of dollars in the development of a Karoo gas field in the event that it got the go- ahead to drill and if its exploration of the area proved fruitful, Shell’s upstream manager for SA, Jan Eggink, said yesterday.

The US Energy Information Administration has estimated that there are 485-trillion cubic feet of shale gas in the Karoo, enough to make SA self-sufficient in energy for decades to come.

Exploration alone would cost Shell $200m even if it was found that the reserves were not exploitable, Mr Eggink told the Cape Town Press Club.

Shell, along with a number of other companies, has applied to the government to explore for gas in the Karoo — a proposal that has generated fierce opposition from environmental lobby groups and some Karoo landowners. The debate rages on, with opponents saying gas mining in the Karoo would desecrate an ecologically sensitive area of pristine beauty. Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu has established a task team to investigate the pros and cons of “fracking” for gas, and is expected to receive this report in the next few months.

Mr Eggink stressed that Shell was committed to paying fair compensation to landowners in the Karoo to gain access to their land and also made the commitment that it would not compete with residents for water. This is one of the major concerns of landowners. Access to sufficient quantities of water will be a critical factor in the decision to develop the gas.

Mr Eggink said about 1-million litres would be required in the exploration phase and a further 5- million to 10-million litres in the development phase. If there was not enough water underground, it would have to be brought in by truck or by pipeline.

Contamination of underground water supplies is another of the key concerns of landowners, as chemicals would be used in the process of hydraulic fracturing.

But Mr Eggink said Shell knew from experience elsewhere “that if a well is properly constructed it will not leak any fluid into groundwater supplies.”

He believed SA would gain enormously from producing its own gas, which was a much cleaner form of fuel than the coal that was currently used to generate about 90% of the country’s electricity. Gas was a cleaner source of energy, which would enable SA to reduce its carbon footprint.

Developing renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind, in sufficient quantities to make an impact would take decades.

Mr Eggink noted that a modern gas power plant generated up to 70% less CO² than the old-styled coal-fired plant and was cheaper to build.

He also stressed that the surface footprint of a shale gas development would be very small (1%) compared to the overall acreage that Shell had applied to explore in, and would create thousands of jobs.

“Rapid economic growth means electricity demand is rising. By drawing on potential abundant gas supplies you can meet rising energy demand while maintaining energy security,” Mr Eggink said.

In the exploration phase, Shell would drill at least six wells, which would reveal whether gas could be extracted in sufficient quantities to be commercially viable. But even before this phase started, an environmental impact assessment would have to be made — a process that could take between 18 months and two years.

ensorl@bdfm.co.za

SOURCE ARTICLE

By James Paton – Jun 15, 2011 10:30 AM GMT+0100

Australia should introduce a cap- and-trade system to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and act “earlier rather than later” to tackle climate change, Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) said.

“The clock is ticking,” Ann Pickard, chairman of Shell’s operations in Australia, said today in a speech in Sydney, according to an e-mailed copy of her presentation. “I do think that it’s in our interest for Australia to be an example to the rest of the world.”

Australia, which has about A$200 billion ($214 billion) of proposed liquefied natural gas projects targeting Asian demand for the fuel, also needs “well thought-out policies on labor and immigration” to deliver a skilled work force, she said. A surging Australian dollar has made labor “even more important to solve,” she said.

Shell, Europe’s largest oil company, expects to invest about $30 billion during the next five years on oil and gas developments in Australia, it said in May. The company plans to pioneer the use of floating LNG technology to develop the Prelude project off northwest Australia and is Chevron Corp. (CVX)’s partner in the proposed Gorgon LNG project.

To contact the reporter on this story: James Paton in Sydney jpaton4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Amit Prakash at aprakash1@bloomberg.net.

SOURCE ARTICLE

Comment posted on Shell Blog by “Outsider” on Jun 15th, 2011 at 4:46 pm

Industry urging governments and business to reject renewables in favour of ‘green’ shale gas

Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent, Wednesday 20 April 2011 17.24 BST

SOURCE ARTICLE