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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.