February 2006


Shell announced record profits in the first week of February at a press conferences in London. Journalist David Strahan (producer of the seminal BBC Money Programme on ‘peak oil’ theory back in 2000) asked CEO Jeroen van der Veer whether Shell had done any detailed modelling on peak oil. Mr. van der Veer replied that his argument was that the world will not arrive at a peak oil situation. He said that peak oil is correct as applied to regional areas of production but does not apply to the world as a whole. Mr. van Der Veer’s justification for this statement was that an unquantifiable level of reserves lie in unconventional oil, and tellingly, coal. Shell is explicitly stating then that the mitigation strategy in the face of a peak of conventional oil will ultimately lie in coal liquifaction. Jeremy Leggett has argued that “amid the ruins of the old energy modus operandi many will try to turn to coal, and so the extent to which renewable energy grows explosively instead of coal expansion, rather than alongside it, will determine whether economies and ecosystems can survive the global warming threat…’Solarisation’ versus ‘coalification’”. Shell have admitted to a conventional oil peak and have announced a mitigation strategy which bodes ill for the future of climate change.

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