Posts Tagged ‘Climate Change’

BARENDRECHT, Netherlands: A plan by oil giant Shell to store 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year in a depleted gas reservoir beneath a Dutch city has drawn the ire of residents and local officials who have vowed to thwart it. “We are going to do everything to oppose this project,” declared Barendrecht deputy mayor Simon Zuurbier, who voiced fears for the safety of the city’s 50,000 inhabitants. “We are taking legal action to get it cancelled and we’ll approve none of the required permits.”

Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 December 2009 07.00 GMT

Shell drip-feeds its environmental ‘credentials’ to the public. Photograph: James Boardman

Editors must love Shell. Almost whatever I have read about climate change and the UN talks in Copenhagen in recent weeks, it has been flanked by the familiar Shell logo somewhere in the background.

From geeky titles like New Scientist to politico mags such as Prospect and New Statesman; and newspapers like the Guardian, the world’s second largest corporation has been splashing out – filling screens and newsprint with adverts and underwriting special supplements. Shell also sponsored a major research project by the Economist Intelligence Unit, called Countdown to Copenhagen, launched early this year at a Shell-sponsored “sustainability summit”.

Nobody is suggesting that Shell is writing the copy. And surely only the most craven editor would leave out criticism of oil companies like Shell. But the unmistakeable message is that Shell is going green.

It’s not just a subliminal message, either. The ads are all about Shell developing new low-carbon technologies, like carbon-capture, biofuels and “helping our customers use energy more efficiently”. They have pretty images, like a butterfly net catching CO2, and a pocket calculator with a button marked “less CO2″.

It won’t be easy, says the message: “We’ll need to think the impossible is possible.” Trouble is, in reality, Shell wants to think the possible is impossible. As its recently retired chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, said earlier this year of wind, solar and hydrogen power: “I don’t expect them to grow much at Shell from here.”

Back then I wrote that “Shell is the new Exxon“. But the latest evidence suggests it is worse than that. A new study of the environmental performance of the world’s top 10 oil and gas companies by the Madrid-based environmental auditing company Management & Excellence puts Shell last of all the western majors. That’s behind BP, Total, Chevron and even ExxonMobil.

Shell has fallen from fourth place to seventh in the past year, and is now propping up the bottom of the table with two Chinese oil giants, Sinopec and Petrochina, and the Russian monolith Gazprom. None are known for their environmental credentials.

The audit analyses the 10 companies according to 198 different criteria. Shell gets a rating of 51%, compared with top-ranking BP’s 77% and Exxon’s 62%.

Shell’s new chief executive Peter Voser last week made one statistical claim for his company’s progress to date. Its chemical plants were, he said, 8% more energy efficient that in 2001.

Good for them. But most other companies are doing better. The M&E study found Shell next to bottom on energy savings.

Shell failed to make the grade in other areas, too. It may spend millions promoting its expertise in alternative energy technologies, but Shell came in the bottom half here, too, with only half the scores of BP, Chevron and the Brazilian oil giant, Petrobras. Once, BP and Shell were bracketed together as companies taking the lead in expanding into renewables. But the report says that among the top 10 today “only BP seems to have a real business in alternative energies”.

Shell spokesman Shaun Wiggins said: “While Shell is aware of Management & Excellence, we have made a conscious choice to not participate in its rankings survey process.” The company says it prefers other environmental audits.

The findings will come as no surprise to those who read Friends of the Earth’s June report on Shell’s Big Dirty Secret, which charged the it with being “the world’s most carbon intensive oil company”.

Shell claims on its websites: “We were one of the first energy companies to acknowledge the threat of climate change.” The tragedy is that this is true, but that so little has come of it.

I have lost count of the number of false dawns at Shell. At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, I reported Shell scientists promising that the company was going to plant tree across the tropics to soak up carbon dioxide. Whatever happened to that idea? Just before the Kyoto climate conference in 1997, Shell announced it was making a $500m investment in solar power. By the World Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 it claimed to be installing solar panels across the developing world. Today it is absent from that business too.

Wiggins said Shell has spent $1.7bn on renewable in the past five years, but now concentrates on biofuels because they are “closest to our core business”. But he agreed that oil and gas still make up 95% of its business, and the truth is that the company has flattered to deceive for almost two decades now.

Readers of its current adverts are directed towards a zappy and visionary website devoted entirely to what might happen in the future. But the future has been a long time coming for Shell. And it seems ever further away.

SOURCE ARTICLE

Shell Oil and British Petroleum express their vehement support for a global carbon tax in “Copenhagen Communique”

EXTRACTS

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, December 7, 2009

The big irony behind top globalists descending on Copenhagen in luxury private jets and stretch limos is not just the fact that their own behavior completely contradicts their self-righteous hyperbole about CO2 emissions, but that their propaganda is vehemently supported by the very same big oil interests they accuse climate skeptics of pandering to.

Probably one of the most flagrant examples of climate cronyism to emerge from the climategate scandal were emails in which CRU scientists, the body that provides much of the foundational global warming data for the UN IPCC, discuss how they conducted meetings with Shell Oil in order to enlist them as a “strategic partner” while getting them to bankroll pro-man made global warming research.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Strange bedfellows these, strange bedfellows indeed. On one side, curled snugly under the duvet, is Dr James Hansen, one of the earliest and most fierce prophets of climate change, and a man who has previously said that the chief executives of fossil fuel companies ‘should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature’. Sharing a pillow on the other side are the chief executives of Shell and ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest and second-biggest fossil fuel companies (actually biggest and second-biggest companies of any kind), Peter Voser and Rex Tillerson. As they wake up on this, the first morning of the Copenhagen climate summit, what is it that these former foes have found to unite them?

…companies such as BP and Royal Dutch Shell, which have bailed out of some unproductive renewable energy sources, are directing most of their environmental attention towards next-generation biofuels designed to alleviate these problems. Shell, for example, is experimenting with cellulosic ethanol made from plant waste such as straw and wood chips and biodiesel made from algae, which can be grown in the sea. However, technologically advanced versions are unlikely to be widespread for another 10 years at least.

Peter Voser, Viewpoint

The Times: December 5, 2009

We are seeing early signs of a far-reaching shift in our world’s energy system. Desire for secure energy supplies and concern over global warming have consumers, companies and governments embarking on a long journey towards a more sustainable energy future.

Government policymakers are in the best position to accelerate our trip. Starting with the climate change summit in Copenhagen this month, they will largely determine whether society steps on the throttle or idles along at the current speed. Building a new energy future will take huge effort. But it will be a boon for consumers, thanks to a great proliferation of energy types, from cleaner fossil fuels to renewables, such as biofuels, wind and solar, to nuclear and hydrogen. Everything from cars to fridges will be much more efficient than what we know today.

Some people hope that that future can arrive as fast as the next big hit in consumer electronics. That is unrealistic. Over the past century each new energy technology, once proved, has taken about 25 to 30 years to grow to providing 1 per cent of the world’s energy. Biofuels are just now reaching that mark. Wind could be there by 2015, 25 years after the world’s first big wind farms went up in Denmark and the United States.

It simply takes time to build the industrial and people capacity needed to produce energy on a massive scale. And to learn by doing. Today’s largest wind turbines have nearly 100 times the generating capacity of the ones available in the mid-1980s.

Society’s great hope for accelerating the pace of change lies with aggressive government policies, incentives and financial support for new energy technologies, from the lab all the way through commercial deployment. Indeed, every major new energy source since coal and oil has flowered thanks to extensive government support and a regulatory framework conducive to private investment.

This is not about government handouts to business. It is about spurring innovation and encouraging companies to invest in technologies that can help to reduce emissions but are still far from able to make money.

Support must be tailored to individual technologies, depending on their stage of development.

Take the promising technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and other industrial facilities and store it safely underground. The knowhow exists but remains to be proved in practice. Governments in Europe, the US, Canada and Australia have pledged more than $20 billion to support some two dozen pilot projects with the hope of having at least ten running by about 2015.

In the longer term, the main factor encouraging deployment of low-carbon technologies will be a price on emitting carbon dioxide. The most effective pricing mechanism is a system that caps CO2 emissions and allows companies to trade emission allowances, as the European Trading Scheme already does.

However, when carbon markets such as Europe’s are still young, they may not produce a carbon price high enough to prime the technology pump. Governments may need to intervene in early years with policies that give additional support to a range of technologies. For instance, Europe has already done so for pioneering carbon capture and storage projects by offering them bonus emission allowances to sell.

Companies are already taking important steps towards a more sustainable future. They are improving the efficiency of facilities and reducing emissions. For instance, Shell chemical plants are nearly 8 per cent more energy efficient than they were in 2001. And we are providing energy-saving advice and products to our customers. We are also raising production of cleaner-burning natural gas. When used to generate electricity, natural gas emits 50 per cent less CO2 than coal. It can help to build a bridge to a future when renewable energy comes of age. By 2012 more than half Shell’s production will be natural gas.

In Copenhagen, governments can lay the foundations of a global policy framework that would help the world to move towards a more sustainable energy future. That is a tall order, given divergent views. But the world needs, and deserves, real progress toward a final deal with binding commitments for emission reductions and funding to help developing nations to do their part.

With governments’ lead, society can jump-start the development of new technologies with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s get going.

• Peter Voser is chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell

TIMES ARTICLE

ArcelorMittal, a giant steelmaker, and Royal Dutch Shell, the oil and gas group, are among companies that have threatened to slow down investment inside the 27-nation bloc unless the rest of the industrialized world, and the United States in particular, adopt similar carbon-capping systems.

Shell’s gas-to-liquid project in Qatar

• Shell’s chief executive reveals two $18bn gas projects
• Despite oil expansion, gas is key to company’s future

Tim Webb
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 November 2009 21.06 GMT

Peter Voser is reeling off Shell’s projects to develop the next generation of biofuels when he gets to its algae scheme in Hawaii. He stops mid-sentence with a doleful look on his face. “I’ve never been to Hawaii,” says Voser, whose whistle-stop tour of Shell’s operations around the world most recently took him to Qatar and Nigeria. “Such are our hardships,” he jokes.

Voser was Shell’s finance director until he took over from Jeroen van der Veer on 1 July as chief executive. He tells the company’s in-house magazine “I love a down-to-earth mentality” and “I’m not a big-ego chief executive type”, befitting his Swiss nationality.

But this week, Voser rolled out Shell’s big guns – two mammoth $18bn (£11bn) gas projects in Qatar, to be precise – in a most un-Swiss manner. On Tuesday, he and Shell’s top executive team led 50 analysts and investors around the two huge construction sites that hold the key to Shell’s future growth: the Qatargas 4 liquefied natural gas project and the Pearl gas-to-liquid project, the world’s largest of its kind. When they ramp up fully, with large-scale production due to start in 2011, they will produce about 350,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, or about 10% of Shell’s current daily production. Shell said that, once on-stream, the projects would generate $4bn of cashflow and mean that by 2012 the company will be producing more gas than oil.

Shell also announced that testing at the Pearl project had begun but confirmed that the start-up of the Qatargas 4 project would be delayed by 10 months, to the end of 2010. Analysts said they had expected delays but Samuel Ciszuk, analyst from Global Insight, said: “It still does not look very good from a project-management point of view.”

Now is a good time to trumpet Shell’s mega-projects, and not just for the benefit of new man Voser. When Shell announced results last month, finance director Simon Henry was downbeat about next year, which could see Shell miss its production targets, particularly with confirmation of the Qatargas 4 delay.

The credit crunch and the resulting slump in oil prices forced Shell, like the rest of the industry, to put on hold expensive new projects such as oil sands in Canada. It has projects under construction that will when completed add another 1m barrels of oil a day but most of these will not come on stream until 2011 or afterwards. Shell wants investors to focus on the rewards to be reaped in 2011 and beyond, rather than next year’s slim pickings.

Voser said that Shell was also reviewing its procurement policy. As a result, of the annual $7bn it spends on procuring drilling services and equipment, for example, it has found 15% of savings. This is partly the result of buying more equipment from China, which is about 20% cheaper than suppliers in other countries.

Earlier this year, Shell said it would refocus its investment on alternative energy on carbon capture and storage (CCS) and biofuels, and would not build any more wind farms. Voser explained that with an estimated1bn new cars on the road within the next 40 years, all types of cleaner technologies – including biofuels – would be needed. Many of those will also be powered by electricity generated by coal plants, which, in order to be truly green, needed CCS to bury their emissions.

Voser said that while he doubted that the Copenhagen climate change summit would result in a firm deal to replace Kyoto, he hoped that CCS would be accepted as a “mitigation technology” that developing countries would receive financial support to develop. “That is on the top of my wish list,” he said.

Like much of the industry, Shell is also going through a disruptive restructuring, which it has called Transition 2009 and will result in 5,000 people losing their jobs, many of them managers. The thousands of staff who are having to apply for the 15,000 new roles being advertised internally will find out in the next 10 days whether they have been successful, and Voser said yesterday that the process should be complete by January.

SOURCE ARTICLE

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – The Dutch government approved a pilot project Wednesday to pump carbon dioxide into depleted gas fields beneath a town of 43,000 people as a way of reducing emissions blamed for global warming.

Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) — Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil producer, said regional mechanisms to reduce carbon dioxide output should be expanded into a global cap-and-trade system to ensure more companies are forced to curb emissions.