Shell Ditches Wind, Solar, and Hydro 883
thefickler writes "Shell has decided to end its investment in wind, solar and hydro projects because the company does not believe they are financially sound investments. Instead Shell is going to focus on carbon sequestration technologies and biofuels. Not surprisingly, and perhaps unfairly, bloggers have been quick to savage the company: 'Between Shell's decisions to stop its clean energy investments and to increase its debt load to pay for dividends, the company is solidifying an image of corporate greed over corporate responsibility.' Is Shell short sighted, or is it just a company trying to make its way in an uncertain world?"
flamebait (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Neither. They're responsible (Score:3, Informative)
If those alternative energy sources were even remotely feasible you can be sure they would be all over them.
Why? Because they are in a rush to make their existing oil lines, distribution networks, and stations obsolete, and want to shake up the system that is making them money? Not to say they have no interest, but they'd be all over them ONLY if they thought they could make even more money doing so, which they might not.
Re: Firehose:Shell ditches wind, solar and hydro (Score:5, Informative)
Theoretically, television may be feasible, but I consider it an impossibility--a development which we should waste little time dreaming about.
- Lee de Forest, 1926, inventor of the cathode ray tube
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
- Thomas J. Watson, 1943, Chairman of the Board of IBM
It doesn't matter what he does, he will never amount to anything.
- Albert Einstein's teacher to his father, 1895
It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become Prime Minister.
- Margaret Thatcher, 1974
This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
- Western Union internal memo, 1876
We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
- H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
- Bill Gates, 1981
Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.
- Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872
Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.
- Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
We don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.
- Hewlett-Packard's rejection of Steve Jobs, who went on to found Apple Computers
King George II said in 1773 that the American colonies had little stomach for revolution.
An official of the White Star Line, speaking of the firm's newly built flagship, the Titanic, launched in 1912, declared that the ship was unsinkable.
In 1939 The New York Times said the problem of TV was that people had to glue their eyes to a screen, and that the average American wouldn't have time for it.
An English astronomy professor said in the early 19th century that air travel at high speed would be impossible because passengers would suffocate.
Airplanes are interesting toys, but they have no military value.
- Marshal Ferdinand Foch in 1911
With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market.
- Business Week, 1958
Whatever happens, the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.
- Frank Knox, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, on December 4, 1941
Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
- Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, October 16, 1929.
Re:What the? (Score:3, Informative)
While it may be true that biofuels can [potentially] result in 75% less emissions at the exhaust pipe, it's important to factor in the emissions from the process of producing, harvesting, refining, etc when making a comparison to fossil fuels. Excluding emissions from the product lifecycle when making an argument for biofuels is very misleading.
Clean Coal is rubbish (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Neither. They're responsible (Score:3, Informative)
According to TFA, Shell have been investing in production facilities (wind farms), in that case they'd be selling energy, not technology.
I seem to remember they used to be one of the biggest investors in PV plants, for which your comment would be true.
How to shove 1000 train cars of carbon under a rug (Score:5, Informative)
At Least Shell Is Honest About It (Score:5, Informative)
I worked for BP's orphan photo-voltaics lab in Toano, Virginia long enough for us to be featured in their big "Beyond Petroleum" advertising blitz...and then poof! they pulled the plug. Although we were doing first-rate science and pilot production of amorphous silicon PV cells, we were left with the impression that we were merely a "green" marketing asset left over from the Amoco merger.
We supplied the green paint, then they threw away the brush. So goes the oil business.
Re:Corporate culture (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Corporate culture (Score:5, Informative)
We really don't know how much oil there is down there, but it's not running out anytime soon.
We've a much better idea of how much oil is down there than in the 1920s. We've already found the easy/cheap-to-exploit stuff, any future finds will be more expensive than what we have now.
Re:Corporate culture (Score:5, Informative)
*facepalm*
Biofuels do not "starve the third world." Nobody credible on the subject of biofuels has seriously advocated using food crops for fuel ("credible" includes those who are not obviously shills for the corn growers here). The crops that, so far, have shown the best potential for fuel sources are not only not food/feed crops, but they can be grown on land that is otherwise unsuitable for food crops.
And maybe if we spent just a portion of our food providing efforts reforming their lands and teaching them to grow and maintain their own food, not only would they be better off in the long run but you'd create jobs where they are desperately needed.
So enough with the "starving the third world" nonsense. There is zero credibility in that argument.
=Smidge=
Re:Corporate culture (Score:1, Informative)
A diesel running on cooking oil?
Re:Energy Return On Energy Input (Score:5, Informative)
And if 30% of our time and energy are going into producing more energy... There isn't much time and energy available to do other things, like run a civilization.
If only we had the technology to produce energy with a favorable EROEI. Maybe one day we'll be able to split the atom or something.
Re:No, no, no (Score:4, Informative)
chernobyl was a second generation reactor
It was in fact a -1 generation reactor. Really. It didn't have even no brainier safety built in and no containment vessel. It had a negative void coefficient no documentation almost no training for the staff. Finally they did the evils of evils, they tried to restart a pile from a shutdown in under 24 hours. Due to Xe poisoning this is a really really bad idea.
Chernobyl is not an example of how unsafe nuclear is. Its a example of how unsafe we can build stuff to save a buck.
Re:New large scale solar plant in Arizona (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, but they generate tons of nuclear waste that doesn't go away for thousands of years.
Waste that could largely be reprocessed into usable fuel if we hadn't abandoned the technology for political reasons back in the 70s. Of course we did and now we get to play catch up with France of all places. And why are tons of nuclear waste a worse thing to deal with than millions of tons of CO2? If we had a real nuclear program back in the 70s/80s we'd be typing this on electricity generated without releasing a single molecule of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Instead the environmentalist lobby keeps saying no to everything because renewables are right around the corner. They've been saying that for decades yet it hasn't materialized. Hmm, I wonder why?
Until then, we should be more responsible as a race and utilize cleaner fuels
What cleaner fuels? Every "cleaner" fuel that can be deployed on a large enough scale to sustain civilization is carbon based. If you believe that man is impacting climate change then this should be the last thing you want.
Re:Corporate culture (Score:5, Informative)
We're already running toward the end of cheap easy to extract oil. From the dawn of the oil age to the 1960s, new large oil fields were discovered close to the surface that were very inexpensive to extract (culminating in the Saudi Ghawar Field in 1948 which has production costs of well under $10/barrel). Here's [wikipedia.org] the list from Wikipedia. I found discovery dates for the missing Mesopotamian field (1961). Since then discoveries have gotten smaller (only three top 10 fields discovered after 1961 and all were under water, two under deep water, which raises the costs of extraction considerably). There will likely be additional oil finds, probably even major field finds, but I believe it's safe to say that we will never find anything that will be large and cheap like the fields that are currently huge producers.
Re:Energy Return On Energy Input (Score:5, Informative)
As much as I like to bash megacorps for their misbehavior... that is completely unfair. I grew up less than 20 minutes from the Duane Arnold Energy Center (a nuclear powerplant outside Cedar Rapids, IA). They've never had an accident.
In fact the WORST accident in the History of nuclear power in the United States was Three Mile - and it was only a disaster because of the misinformation is spread about nuclear energy. The TOTAL dose of radiation that managed to escape Three Mile was less than the dose you'd get from the radioisotopes in the granite making up the halls of congress in a day.
Furthermore there are more modern reactor designs in which they're design to be IMPOSSIBLE to have criticality excursions (aka melt downs) - things such as PBRs where the nuclear moderator used in it is designed to become more efficient at capturing neutrons at higher temperatures. Literally if the coolant system fails the reactor, just by nuclear physics, ramps itself down. They've tried to make a PBR melt down, you cannot do it - their design was a success.
There are also other designs that cannot have criticality excursions.
Then there is also research into fusion reactors - again something that cannot have criticality excursions.
Re:Corporate culture (Score:4, Informative)
Sometime you should look up the break down of where corn goes.
Here's a spoiler for you: the vast majority of corn produced goes into animal feed. Not 50%. Not 60% More like 80%+. Corn used for ethanol fuel is a sliver of the human use percentage.
But yeah, we're totally starving third world countries to make ethanol. Totally.
Re: Firehose:Shell ditches wind, solar and hydro (Score:3, Informative)
640K ought to be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates, 1981
As much as I would just LOVE to defend ole Bill, no one can prove that he actually said this at any one point in time. Is just a nerd urban legend. Unless someone has proof?
Check out the 'misattributed' section for him here:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates [wikiquote.org]
*sigh* Something tells me I'm gonna be modded to hell.
Re:It's fusion or bust (Score:3, Informative)
I work for a power generator. We wanted to place a windmill on our site but couldn't. One reason was the shadow, the other was lack of wind on the hill where we're based.
Re:Corporate culture (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Corporate culture (Score:3, Informative)
Incidentally, what we're seeing now is very similar to what happened with the price of the last portable fuel we used before petroleum oil: whale oil (which is renewable if harvested in low enough quantities). There were massive oscillations in price [typepad.com] that started just after the production of whale oil production peaked in 1845 when the whales started being hunted faster than they could reproduce. The great-grand-parent is totally wrong about the peak being in the future, it's here now and we all have to deal with that. The real question now is how long production can be sustained at this level and how soon will it decline?
By not trying to move onto new energy sources, Shell is resigning itself to becoming a two-bit company. You'd think they would have learned their lesson in 2004 when they had to downgrade their reserve estimates [marketwatch.com], but I guess not. I wouldn't buy stock in them.
Re:Energy Return On Energy Input (Score:3, Informative)
You mean waste that is mostly because of stupid regulations [wsj.com] from the late 1970s?
From the article:
If we could actually reprocess the spent nuclear material we would end up with very little real waste.
Re:New large scale solar plant in Arizona (Score:5, Informative)
We already have cleaner nuclear fuel through the ability to reprocess the waste. The problem is that we have antiquated laws from the 1970s prevents us from being able to do so. Hell, we have to import our medicinal isotopes from Canada because we are not allowed to refine them here. Good read here [wsj.com].
Re:Corporate culture (Score:3, Informative)
The political and socioeconomic development of most third-world nations was ruined by Western powers dating back to the colonial era, carrying through neo-colonialism and the Cold War. Now World Bank / IMF policies turn third world nations quite capable of feeding themselves into grain importers [thenation.com].
Re:New large scale solar plant in Arizona (Score:3, Informative)
No it will not.
The TVM on $1b capital is at least $50m a year, but for a moderately risky investment it will be more like $75m. That means that your example plant only generates $25-50m profit a year. That's a 20-30 year payback, which is close to the design lifetime of the panels (20-25 years) and certainly less than the design lifetime of all the other components in the plant (rotators, inverters, storage devices).
Plus real-estate taxes (which you may get a pass on, which means your state gets poorer) plus insurance (against, say, hail damage) plus lots of maintenance on a quantity of panels and infrastructure large enough to supply $100m of electricity. You handwave these things away but they are dealbreakers when the plant can already barely pay for itself by the time it wears out.
I'm not saying that actual solar plants have financials along these lines (though they are still underwater, which is the reason nobody is building them). I'm just using this to show that you don't know your economic fundamentals.
Re:Energy Return On Energy Input (Score:5, Informative)
And that still haven't figured out what to do with the waste?
Amazingly enough France doesn't have this problem because they recycle the waste.
Waste, safety, weapons proliferation, and fuel sarcity make uranium/plutonium fission a dead end
The French have solved the waste problem, the "safety" issue is FUD, weapons proliferation can be dealt with through the existing channels (and seems to be happening anyway without much help from the civilian power industry) and I have yet to see any proof that we are running out of fissionable material.
Re:Libs will have a field day (Score:3, Informative)
Without judging the merits of Shell's business decision, wind is getting pretty competitive. I just switched to a 100% wind provider with a 1 year price lock of 11.2 cents/kwh. That's the same as what Pepco charges me now. PV still is too expensive, but wind is getting there or in my case, is already here.
Re:Libs will have a field day (Score:3, Informative)
"Wind & solar are (at this time) cost prohibitive"
No, they're not. In fact, with a hybrid wind and solar design I'm working on, you can have both energy systems in one package and for a fairly cheap price. We have spray-on PV, and PV that can be printed out like newspaper, just check out Nanosolar.
I wish I had some extra funding for this idea, because just using the current tech I could theoretically generate enough power for the entire USA with about a quarter of Arizona's land using what I'm designing. Total cost *MIGHT* run about twenty to thirty million dollars.
That's not too much to power an entire country.
Re:How to shove 1000 train cars of carbon under a (Score:3, Informative)
A typical 1000 Megawatt coal powerplant such as the behemoth ERGs boondoggle just being completed in SE Wisconsin requires 1215 train carloads of Coal (Carbon) every day. Once burned, each carbon molocule (Atomic Weight 12) will have two Oxygen Molecules (Atomic Weight 16) attached to it and this 'refuse' to be sequestured will weigh 3.67 times as much. All else being equal, this means you would need 4459 boxcars full of carbon junk leaving the power plant. But CO2 can't easily be compressed into boxcars so it is likely the carbon will be sequestered with calcium or silicon (in rock), and weigh much more. And Shell thinks this is cheaper than solar, wind and hydropower? Have I missed April fools day or is someone playing a shell game?
All the wind power generation [wikipedia.org] in Germany (the world leader) in 2007 was 38.5 TWH, or an average of 4.4 GWe (of course, it wasn't a continuous 4.4 GWe, but up and down with wind speed). That is 4.4 GWe average on 22.2 GW rated of turbines, or about 20% of installed capacity. There are 19,460 turbines in Germany for their 22 GW rated capacity.
4.4 GWe continuous could come from 3 Gen. III ABWR [gepower.com] nuclear reactors. 3 versus 19,460. An ABWR needs to be refueled once every two years, or an average of 76 tons of fuel per year (one train car worth) per reactor.