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Shell president talks about CO2, Calif Prop 87, lowering prices (video & transcript)
E&E TV
With several oil companies recognizing the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the climate, Shell Oil Co. is actively pushing a national global warming initiative. During today’s E&ETV Event Coverage, Shell Oil Co. President John Hofmeister discusses the importance of addressing the CO2 issue. He talks about why his company does not support California’s Proposition 87, which will place an extraction tax on crude extracted in California. Hofmeister also denies accusations that oil companies are purposely lowering prices prior to the midterm elections to help maintain Republican leadership.
(25 Oct 2006)
When an oil executive is worried . . .
Ted Sickinger, Portland Oregonian
Q&A: – With crisis a constant worry, Shell’s chief says, Americans can no longer feel entitled to use energy
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It’s finally come to this: Even oil executives are sounding alarms about U.S. oil consumption.
“The ease with which we all lived in the last 50 years, with cheap energy, is coming to a close,” John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., told a City Club luncheon crowd Friday in Portland. “The next 50 years cannot be like the last 50 years.”
The oil demand-and-supply equation, Hofmeister said, now constantly flirts with crisis. Americans, he said, need to develop a sense of privilege rather than entitlement when it comes to energy use.
At the helm of Houston-based Shell Oil since March 2005, Hofmeister aims to take that message to 50 cities around the country by the end of 2007. In his talks, he is promoting a panoply of supply-side measures, from expanding access to oil fields that are off-limits today to developing alternative and renewable energy resources. Shell, he said, also is eager to persuade consumers to conserve.
…Q: Ken Deffeyes, a former Shell petroleum geologist and Princeton University professor, predicted that the rate of new oil discoveries peaked this past Thanksgiving, and we’re already on the down slope of the production peak. Is he right?
A: No, I don’t think we’ve reached peak oil. I think that what we call easy oil, conventional oil and gas that’s coming out of the ground at single-digit (dollar-per-barrel production) cost levels, we may have peaked. But in terms of worldwide reserves of oil and gas, we’re a long way from peak oil.
The world today is producing about 85 million barrels a day. If you look at the growth curves of both the developing nations and developed nations, we’re looking at needing 120 million barrels a day by the 2020 or 2025 time frame. That’s a 50 percent improvement from where we are today.
We think the reserves are out there to do that, but it won’t all be conventional, easy oil. A lot of it will be more challenging, more technically complex, and will include unconventional sources of oil such as oil shale and oil sands.
Q: Some experts think production in Saudi Arabia has already peaked, and that it’s overstating its reserves. Is that true, and what does it say about potential shocks to our economy?
A: Like many others, I’ve read “Twilight in the Desert” by Matthew Simmons, and I’ve also talked to his excellency Turki al-Faisal about that book.
(28 Oct 2006)
UPDATE: just added this article.
Japan Hits Big Setbacks in Push for Energy
Yuka Hayashi, Dow Jones Newswires via RigZone
Just five months after it was unveiled, Japan’s ambitious 25-year plan to sharply increase oil and gas development is hitting snags, suggesting Tokyo may find it even harder than expected to stabilize the nation’s future energy supply.
On Monday, Exxon Mobil Corp. said it reached a preliminary agreement to sell natural gas from a giant project off Russia’s Sakhalin Island to China, instead of to Japan as originally planned. This came several weeks after Russia ratcheted up regulatory pressure that could jeopardize another Sakhalin gas project in which the bulk of the planned output of nearly 10 million tons a year — about a fifth of Japan’s current natural-gas imports — was destined for Japan.
…The developments are a blow to Japan, which had counted on the deals as a major component of its push to expand its access to energy. The world’s second-largest national economy relies nearly entirely on imports for its oil and gas, making it vulnerable to swings in global oil prices or political tensions in energy-producing regions.
(25 Oct 2006)
‘Fund clean energy with oil tax’
Terry Macalister, The Guardian
Oil companies should be subjected to a windfall tax to fund a transition to a sustainable energy system, according to a leading charity and thinktank report published today.
The UK must follow the lead of Norway and create an oil legacy fund to ensure the benefits of hydrocarbons are shared by future generations, the WWF and New Economics Foundation (NEF) argue. The call for a new tax comes days before BP and Shell unveil third-quarter profits expected to reach a combined $11bn (£5.8bn).
(23 Oct 2006)
