Slashdot Mirror
Shell Ditches Wind, Solar, and Hydro
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?"
The post header is a flamebait - and the mods have really screwed up for not having caught it. If you read the TFA (yes yes, I know this is /.), the article headline says "Shell dumps wind, solar and hydro power in favour of biofuels"
They are saying that compared to investing in wind, solar and hydro, they want to invest in biofuel reseach, since they think it will be profitable (duh! they are a company - they exist to make a reasonable profit).
The impression I got from reading the slashdot post header was that shell has decided to go completely out of alternative energy (/non fossil fuels) entirely.
Posting sensationalist headlines is o.k. for mags - why do that here on /.?
"Laziness is an optimisation protocol"
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.
It is important to take the entire lifecycle into account when measuring CO2 emissions.
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.
Scrubbing a few percent of sulfur or nitrogen oxides from flue gas is one thing but let's suppose they develop technology to scrub all the carbon dioxide -that is, the vast bulk of waste gas from combustion -aside from the (presumably) environmentally benign water. Just how much of the stuff are they going to have to deal with? Stoichiometry and Periodic Table data help here. Ideally, one tonne of carbon (Atomic Weight 12) will generate 3.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide (Molecular Weight 44). So, roughly speaking, every semi-trailer (or train) full of the back dirty stuff brought into the power plant will require four trucks or trains to carry the waste away! Probably more due to the difficulties of bulk-handling compressed gases. Since we need to store the stuff safely for geological time-spans we also need to consider the volume of the waste collected. One cubic metre of coal will generate perhaps 5000 cubic metres of carbon dioxide at room temperature and pressure. (There's some uncertainty about just how much coal is in a cubic metre. It's not likely to be a solid lump but if it was, there would be 3.6 tonnes. Powdered coal would be somewhat less dense but you get the idea.) That's a lot of champagne bubbles! Obviously the waste gas, once collected, is going to need to be compressed and refrigerated to make the handling challenge more manageable but more energy will be needed for that. The Lake Nyos burp disaster killed 1700 Cameroonians in 1986, so large depositories of carbon dioxide are not to be trifled with. Carbon sequestration is just camouflage for corporate dinosaurs.
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?
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.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
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.
*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=
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
It's not a matter of running out, I doubt we ever will (some oil products are worth many hundreds of dollars/barrel so the price will be very high and rare hydrocarbon based chemicals will still get made as we get close to the limit. Thats true of every non-renewable resources, and is very well established economics. As examples, even though it was one of the earliest exploited fields, there still sits quite a bit of oil in Pennsylvania, but it hasn't been cost effective to extract it (there was some interest when oil was rising to $140/barrel but I'd presume that has died back down).
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 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.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
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.
That is true. Excessive CO2 can actually hurt plants.
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.
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.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.