By Carl Meyer | News, Energy, Politics | March 4th 2020

A disputed environmental claim publicized by the fossil fuel firms backing a $40-billion liquefied natural gas project in B.C. can be traced back to a lifelong industry insider, who cautioned in interviews that his underlying calculations are “theoretical.”

Rob Seeley has been held up as an independent consultant who has demonstrated the green bona fides of natural gas coming from the proposed B.C. project, LNG Canada. The Coastal GasLink pipeline being built through unceded Wet’suwet’en Nation territory is meant to transport fracked gas to this terminal, where it would be liquefied, loaded onto ships and exported to Asia. read more

EXTRACTS (Entire New York Magazine article can be read here)

Since 2017, when I published a book about American millennials, I’ve had the occasional cold call from corporations to come talk about my work, all but one of which I’ve turned down. But last fall, the Shell Scenarios team — as in Royal Dutch Shell, one of the biggest oil companies in the world — offered me £2,000 in exchange for a 15-minute talk and my participation in a group exercise. Its internal corporate think tank was holding a daylong conference about how generational change would affect the hopefulness projected in what the company calls the “Sky Scenario,” which it describes as “a technically possible but challenging pathway for society to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.” I’m not a climate expert, but apparently I qualify as a generational whisperer, at least to Shell, and to talk to me about global warming, the giant energy conglomerate wanted to fly me to London from Philadelphia, business class. I warned them that I couldn’t keep their money and asked if I’d need to sign an NDA. When they said no, I saw an opportunity to report on the oil company, undercover while in plain sight, without technically lying to anyone. It was too good to pass up. I said yes, then I emailed my editor. read more

By Nick Cunningham – Mar 01, 2020, 4:00 PM CST

ExxonMobil saw its share price nosedive by roughly 15 percent in the past week, one in a series of oil companies that finds itself in a freefall.

Four other oil majors – Chevron, BP, Shell and Total – also declined sharply, dragged down by the worst weekly loss for oil prices in more than four years.

But the problems for the oil majors run much deeper than the coronavirus, and their share price declines have been underway for quite some time. read more

FEBRUARY 27, 2020 / 10:26 AM

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Oil and gas company Royal Dutch Shell and Dutch gas company Gasunie [GSUNI.UL] plan to build a massive green hydrogen plant in the northern Netherlands in the next decade, the companies said on Thursday, to cut emissions.

Fueled by a large new wind farm off the coast of Groningen province, the plant would ultimately be able to produce 800,000 tonnes of hydrogen by 2040, the companies said, cutting the Netherlands’ CO2 emissions by about 7 megaton per year. read more

February 27, 2020

Oil giant Shell, gas group Gasunie and Groningen’s port authority are joining forces to build a massive offshore wind farm and hydrogen plant in the northern province, Dutch media reported on Thursday.

The plan, dubbed NortH2, will be formally presented on Thursday afternoon but will, the companies say, be one of the ‘biggest renewable energy projects in the world’.

The project is still at the planning stage and definitive investment decisions still have to be taken. read more

Friday February 21, 2020

Royal Dutch Shell will not “get into an arms race” with BP over carbon targets, a senior executive has said, in a sign that Europe’s biggest oil group will not rush to match its rival’s “net zero” pledge.

The Anglo-Dutch group was the first oil major to set long-term ambitions related to emissions from customers using its products, pledging in 2017 to halve the intensity of its carbon footprint by 2050.

BP had been seen as a laggard on climate targets but last week Bernard Looney, its new chief executive, leapfrogged rivals with an ambition to eliminate the carbon footprint of all the oil and gas it produces by 2050. read more

by Daniel Binns: Published February 19, 2020

SEVEN out of ten Britons plan to buy an electric car when they trade in their current vehicle, a survey shows.

Cheaper fuel costs and being seen to do more to clean up the planet are major motivating factors, found Shell Energy.

Another is the phasing out of petrol and diesel cars — after the government revealed sales of new ones will be ended in 2035, five years earlier than planned.

Colin Crooks, the chief executive of Shell Energy, said: ‘We support the need for the UK to move faster to meet climate targets and research shows there is public support for the earlier ban on traditional car sales.’ read more

By Sam Morgan | EURACTIV.com

Oil and gas giant Shell has plans for a 100-megawatt grid storage battery in the west of England. It is slated to be the biggest battery in Europe once it is completed later this year and will be crucial to the UK’s quest to remain the continent’s top wind power player.

The battery project in the county of Wiltshire aims to store renewable power in two 50MW cells and then sell it to consumers when demand and prices are high.

“Projects like this will be vital for balancing the UK’s electricity demand and supply as wind and solar power play bigger roles in powering our lives,” said Shell Energy Europe vice president David Wells. read more

Alice Grundy: Junior reporter, Current± 20 February 2020

Shell Energy is launching a new electric vehicle (EV) charging offer including an EV tariff and charger.

The offer includes a discounted home smart charger installed for £299, a saving of 14% compared to the retail price of £349.

The charger, provided by Shell-owned NewMotion, provides 7kW of power, charging a typical EV in five hours, Shell said. It will be powered by 100% renewable energy, with Shell Energy switching to 100% renewables last year as it re-branded from First Utility. read more

San Francisco — Google parent company Alphabet Inc. is shutting down its power-generating-kites firm Makani, the first closure of a “moonshot” project since Alphabet founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back from management in December.

Shell said it was “exploring options” to take on Makani’s technology and keep developing it. “Offshore wind has the potential to reach the large-scale generation capacity that society needs to transition to a lower-carbon energy system,” said Dorine Bosman, vice president of Shell Wind Development. “We believe that Makani remains one of the leading airborne-wind technologies in the world.” read more

Shell will buy and trade electricity from what’s claimed to be Europe’s biggest battery storage project currently being built by Chinese players in the UK, in another big step by the oil group into the power sector.

Shell Energy Europe signed a multi-year offtake deal for output from the 100MW/100MWh Minety storage project in southwest England, underway under a collaboration between China Huaneng Group and Chinese sovereign wealth fund CNIC.

Power from the project, designed to balance intermittent wind and solar output on the UK grid, will be traded by Shell’s specialist Limejump subsidiary, which is claimed to manage the largest network of batteries in the UK. read more

FEBRUARY 17, 2020

LONDON, Feb 17 (Reuters) –

* Shell Energy Europe Limited, the energy marketing and trading division of Royal Dutch Shell has agreed a multi-year supply deal for power from a battery storage project in southwest England, the company said on Monday.

* The two 50-MW batteries will enable Shell Energy Europe and its subsidiary Limejump to use renewable power in the area, the firm said.

* When fully charged, a 100-MW battery could hold 100 megawatt hours of electricity, enough to power about 10,000 homes for a day before being recharged. read more

BP’s pledge to zero out all its carbon emissions by 2050 deepens the divide between major European and American oil producers on climate change, increasing the pressure for Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. to do more.

The U.S. giants have committed only to reducing greenhouse gases from their own operations. On Wednesday, BP followed Royal Dutch Shell and Equinor in pledging to offset the carbon emissions from the fuels they sell. Known as Scope 3, the emissions from cars, homes and factories are responsible for 90% of fossil fuel pollution. read more

BP Boss Looney Sets Out to ‘Reinvent’ Oil Giant With Zero Carbon Goal

Reuters: Feb. 12, 2020

LONDON — BP set one of the oil sector’s most ambitious targets for curbing carbon emissions on Wednesday as new chief executive Bernard Looney began the biggest revamp in its 111-year history.

While investor groups welcomed the 2050 targets set out by Looney, which put BP ahead of rivals Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Equinor and all of the U.S. oil majors, environmental campaigners criticized a lack of detail.

“We have got to change and change profoundly because the world is changing fast and so are society’s expectations of us,” Looney said in his first major speech as CEO, after earlier highlighting a need to “reinvent BP”. read more

BP, Shell, Chevron and Exxon have made almost $2tn in profits in the past three decades as their exploitation of oil, gas and coal reserves has driven the planet to the brink of climate breakdown, according to analysis for the Guardian.

The scale of their profits is revealed as experts say the fossil fuel boom is coming to an end, with big oil entering a “death knell” phase, according to one prominent Wall St commentator.

Analysis for the Guardian by Taxpayers for Common Sense in the US reveals that since 1990 – at which point the impact of fossil fuel extraction on the climate had been well known to industry leaders and politicians for years, experts say – the big four companies have accumulated $1.991tn in profits. read more