Lethal Heating: 05/26/16

26/05/2016

Green Really Is The New Black As Big Oil Gets A Taste For Renewables

The Guardian - Terry Macalister

Shell, Total, Statoil, even Exxon - they're all at it. But are the recent moves into solar and wind power lip service, fashion, or a real shift away from fossil fuels?

A Shell oil refinery in Singapore: the Anglo-Dutch group has set up a New Energies division. Photograph: Edgar Su/Reuters

The world's largest oil companies have in recent weeks announced a series of "green" investments – in wind farms, electric battery storage systems and carbon capture and storage (CCS). These unexpected moves come hot on the heels of revelations by Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest crude exporter, that it plans to sell off parts of its national oil company and diversify its economy away from petroleum.
They also come in the aftermath of a United Nations climate change agreement and before annual general meetings for Shell and Exxon Mobil this week, meetings at which shareholders will demand that more be done to tackle climate change.
So has the fossil fuel industry finally woken up to the dangers posed to their futures by a move to a low-carbon world, or is this all "greenwash" – relatively insignificant investments designed to shake off critics?
Or does it just make good business sense for Big Oil to do this at a time when oil prices are low, renewable projects look like steady long-term investments, and green businesses can be snapped up on the cheap?
Some of the moves certainly have serious amounts of cash behind them. Total of France, for instance, announced two weeks ago that it planned to spend nearly €1bn on buying 100-year-old battery manufacturer Saft. Chairman and chief executive Patrick Pouyanné said the deal would "allow us to complement our portfolio with electricity storage solutions, a key component of the future growth of renewable energy".
Pouyanné had said in April that electricity would be "the energy of the 21st century" and that he wanted his company to take advantage of the entire electricity value chain, including batteries, solar power and biogas generation. Total announced last year that it was spending €200m on transforming an unprofitable oil refinery into a biofuel plant, and separately that it would start to invest $500m a year in renewables.
Total made its first real drive into renewable energy five years ago, with its $1.4bn acquisition of SunPower, one of the largest solar panel makers in the US. Total has also since set up a division, called New Energies, for these low-carbon technologies.
Shell has done the same. No public announcement has yet been made but, behind the scenes, the Anglo-Dutch group has also established a New Energies arm, under the control of executive board member Maarten Wetselaar.

North America’s largest solar farm, built by SunPower, which is 60% owned by Total. Photograph: Olivia Hampton/AFP/Getty Images

Ben van Beurden, the Shell group chief executive, is expected to talk about the new division at the company's annual capital markets day on 7 June, but it is known to encompass existing hydrogen, biofuels and electricity activities. Shell's New Energies arm will have a $200m annual budget for acquisitions. Last month, the group made a bid, with partners, to build two windfarms off the coast of the Netherlands that could generate enough electricity to power 825,000 households.
Its Big Oil rival, Statoil of Norway, has also been active in the sector: it last month outlined plans to spend €1.2bn, in partnership with E.ON, on the German Arkona windfarm in the Baltic sea.
"This investment is in line with our strategy to gradually complement our oil and gas portfolio with profitable renewable energy and other low-carbon solutions," said Eldar Sætre, Statoil's president and chief executive.
Statoil has also just been granted a seabed lease that will allow it to build the world's largest floating windfarm, Hywind, off the coast of Scotland. A new battery storage solution for offshore wind energy will be piloted from the same project, and Statoil has also followed the trend and established a New Energy division for wind power and CCS. The Norwegian state operator has also just established a new fund, Statoil Energy Ventures, which will invest up to $200m over four to seven years.

An artist's impression of the world's largest floating windfarm, planned off the coast of Scotland.

Irene Rummelhoff, executive vice-president for New Energy Solutions at Statoil, said she was convinced global warming was a very serious problem and her company wanted to help find a solution. "We strongly believe oil and gas will still be needed in future but we also know we have to do things differently and are working to reduce the carbon footprint of these operations," she said.
"Equally we are building a renewable energy business, not because we have to, but because we want to. There is tremendous growth in that sector and we want to be part of that.
"It makes sense to utilise our project-management skills from oil and gas to offshore wind which is why we are operating Sheringham Shoals and Dudgeon Sands off the UK. We are also looking at more carbon capture schemes and at solar [worldwide]."
Even Exxon Mobil, often dismissed by climate change activists as the most conservative oil company of them all, has recently unveiled plans to investigate CCS more fully in a new partnership with a fuel cell company.
But some of the sums being invested are quite small: the Shell New Energies, for example, has a capital expenditure budget of just under 0.5% of its total. And oil companies do have form for shouting loudly about moving into renewables only to beat a hasty retreat.
BP in particular was pilloried for promising to go "beyond petroleum" – then running down its alternative energy division. Shell used to have a very big solar business, but this was scaled down several years ago.
Environmentalists are increasing the pressure on oil companies by accusing them of trying to slow the march to low-carbon energy, if not of being the climate-change deniers some were of old.
There are even claims that Big Oil has been deliberately infiltrating renewable energy lobby groups so that it can push its agenda of keeping gas, in particular, as a "transition fuel" of the future – something the companies deny.

Exxon is dismissed as conservative, but has recently become involved with CCS. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

But academics such as Paul Stevens, an energy expert at thinktank Chatham House, have warned that large oil companies must transform their business or face a "short, brutal" end within 10 years. Jeremy Leggett, a former petroleum geologist who went on to found photovoltaics group SolarCentury, thinks the oil companies are taking precautions as the world moves towards low-carbon energy. "The oil and gas majors are in a fascinating place," he said. "They're starting to use clean-energy investments to hedge their bets that markets for oil and gas will exist decades from now.
"These investments are of varying degrees of seriousness. I would put Total at the top of the league table at the moment. But, unlike many of the big utilities, none of the majors has yet grasped the nettle and told stakeholders that the game is up. That oil and gas will be over by year X, and strategy is now being based on back-mapping from that year."
The Brussels-based SolarPower Europe lobby group also believes that of all the oil majors, Total of France is on a steady path to become the "green giant" of the future.
James Watson, chief executive of SolarPower Europe, says: "We take Total's moves seriously. From our perspective, it has been a long-time player in solar, it was a founding member of SolarPower Europe back in 1985. It acquired SunPower back in 2011 and recently announced that it wants to be one of the top three solar players by early next decade.
"I suspect that it has also been pushing for the French government to drive solar – and we saw recently the announcement by the French government that they will triple the amount of deployed solar in France by 2022. This could make France the leading annual installer in Europe up to that point.
"Shell has a stake in the Japanese solar company Solar Frontier, but has yet to do anything in Europe. We know its boss sees solar as the backbone of energy in the future, but at an undefined time. Having no date does not suggest a strong commitment."
Oil analysts themselves say it makes sense for oil companies to invest in renewables at a time when the value of green firms is also depressed by the low oil price. One leading City figure saw lots of reason for this: "Assets are relatively cheap; it's a good time to diversify; and you can keep some of the low-carbon critics at bay. Also, the oil companies have a herd mentality: once one of them does it, you can expect the rest to follow. You could say green is in fashion."

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Australian Climate Job Cuts Leave Hole In Southern Hemisphere Research

Nature - Dyani Lewis

Details of redundancies at CSIRO alarm global climate community.

AFP/Stringer/Getty Images

A laboratory that analyses ice cores from Law Dome, Antarctica (pictured) may be curtailed as a result of layoffs from CSIRO, Australia's national science agency. Job losses at Australia's national science agency will threaten the monitoring and analysis of the Southern Hemisphere's seas, air and climate, scientists say.
Staff at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which employs thousands of scientists across Australia, were told over the past week where long-awaited job cuts in climate science are likely to fall. Many CSIRO researchers who spoke to Nature about the lay-offs requested anonymity so as not to breach the organization's communications policy, which tells researchers not to discuss funding or management decisions. But the information that is trickling out means that scientists are already evaluating the likely impact on research – although a consultation process means that it may be months before an expected 140 lay-offs in climate research are complete.
"It's significant beyond the numbers because of our overall uniqueness," says oceanographer Peter Craig, who worked for CSIRO for 30 years but retired from the agency at the end of March. "The rest of the world does rely on us for both measurements and interpretation of what's going on on this side of the world."
CSIRO scientists in Melbourne who analyse ice cores from an ice cap called Law Dome in Antarctica – a group colloquially known as the 'Ice Lab' – fear their programme is one that might be curtailed.
Because the Law Dome accumulates ice very rapidly and traps low levels of impurities as it grows, its cores constitute the most reliable record of greenhouse-gas emissions over the past 2,000 years, says Malte Meinshausen, a climate modeller at the University of Melbourne and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Climate models that predict how many degrees of warming will occur under different greenhouse-gas emissions scenarios rely heavily on its record, Meinshausen says.
David Etheridge, head of ice core research, says that he has not been told he will lose his job, but that other scientists who do ice core analysis are facing redundancy. CSIRO has said that the Ice Lab will remain open, but Etheridge believes that cuts will have negative consequences for palaeo-climate research and the climate models that rely on it.

Aerosol fear
CSIRO researchers also fear that Australia's contributions to the world's largest ground-based network of aerosol sensors, called AERONET — a NASA-led project to verify the sometimes ambiguous aerosol measurements made by satellite — are in jeopardy. On 1 May, Brent Holben, who leads the AERONET project in Greenbelt, Maryland, wrote to CSIRO to urge that it reconsider its cuts. He said that they would cause the loss of aerosol measurements over a large region of the Southern Hemisphere.
Asked for a statement, the agency said: "CSIRO is working with partners to identify the most efficient way of delivering this work."

Sea-level expertise
Notable among individual staff set to lose their jobs is John Church, an expert on sea-level rise who has worked for CSIRO for 38 years and who coordinated a chapter on sea-level change for the most recent assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2014.
Church was at sea on the research vessel RV Investigator when he learnt last week that, as he had expected, he would be made redundant.
"John has probably done more to lay a really firm scientific foundation under the issue of sea-level rise than anyone else in the world," says Steve Rintoul, a fellow oceanographer at the CSIRO. "The signal that this sends to both staff within and outside of CSIRO is really horrible."
The RV Investigator's voyage from the Southern Ocean to the Equator is currently mapping deep-ocean temperature and chemistry under the international GO-SHIP program, and is also deploying Argo and biogeochemistry floats that gather data at the ocean surface. CSIRO says that neither the frequency of the ship's expeditions nor the associated data analysis will be adversely affected. But researchers who did not want to be named said that, with the cuts, they doubted that such extensive surveys would be possible in the future, or that other Australian agencies could fill the gaps in expertise if oceanography groups were disbanded.

Layoffs in CSIRO's oceanography groups may dampen the productivity of the Australian research vessel RV Investigator. (CSIRO. CC-BY-3.0)

CSIRO had first announced in February that it planned to shed hundreds of jobs as part of a strategic shift away from basic climate science; in April, it confirmed that this included almost 140 lay-offs in its 'Oceans and Atmosphere' and 'Land and Water' divisions.
The CSIRO cuts are "inexplicable", says Thomas Stocker at the University of Berne, who co-chaired the IPCC's Working Group I (which examines the physical science of climate change) between 2008 and 2015. He is particularly concerned about the cuts to the sea-level research group. "It's simply not understandable for me that the stewards of a country that is so fundamentally exposed to sea-level rise is able to basically terminate research activity in their own country," he says.
Negotiations since February have staved off cuts in some programmes, says one senior scientist at CSIRO's Aspendale site in Melbourne. For example, CSIRO ratcheted back cuts for a team that analyses air pollution from data drawn from the remote Cape Grim Observatory in Tasmania, so that Australia could continue to meet obligations to international agreements such as the Montreal Protocol, which governments signed in 1987 to protect the stratospheric ozone layer from damage by chlorofluorocarbons.
But it seems that the bulk of the cuts will not be reversed. Although more than 3,000 scientists have urged Australian politicians and CSIRO management in an open letter to reconsider the proposed lay-offs, the government has distanced itself, saying that they are an agency-level decision. With national elections set for 2 July, the opposing Labor party has said that if it were elected, it would direct the CSIRO's board to stop the lay-offs. However, it would not reappoint scientists who accept redundancies before then.

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La Trobe University Commits To Full Fossil Fuel Divestment

New Matilda - Thom Mitchell

A creative action at Melbourne University earlier this month. Fossil Free University of Melbourne.

La Trobe University has become the first in Australia to commit to full divestment from fossil fuels, according to an email circulated to University staff earlier this morning and seen by New Matilda.
Vice Chancellor Professor John Dewar said that over the next five years La Trobe will "divest from the top 200 publicly-traded fossil fuel companies ranked by the carbon content of their fossil fuel reserves".
"We are the first university in Australia to make a commitment to complete divestment in this way," Prof Dewar said. "We can be proud of our status as the leading sustainable university in Australia, and a leader internationally."
He said the University was also committed to being open and transparent and that, "Accordingly, we will also disclose the carbon exposure of our investments and provide annual reports of our divestment progress over the next five years".
Fossil Free campaigner and current La Trobe student Michaela Carter welcomed the decision, saying it "vindicates years of work to get the university to take a responsible attitude toward their investment portfolio".
Academic staff have also lauded the move. "I am really proud of my university for choosing to divest from fossil fuel investments," said Ben Habib, Lecturer in Politics & International Relations and Course Coordinator of Master of International Relations.
He said the decision "reinforces the demonstrated commitment of the many academics, professional staff and students across the University community to strong climate action". Vice-Chancellor Dewar also took the opportunity to "thank the students and staff that have been advocating for this change".

IMAGE: Thom Mitchell.

Prof Dewar said that the decision would not compromise returns on the University's investments. "Divesting in fossil fuels will not inhibit our ability to achieve the annual returns on investments that we need to ensure that the University remains in a robust financial position," the Vice-Chancellor said.
Despite increasing pressure from students and staff, Universities have copped flack for distancing themselves from fossil fuels in the past. When the Australian National University made a decision to partially divest in 2014 they were pounded with criticism from former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and the conservative press.
Other Universities to pursue partial divestment include the University of Sydney, Monash and Swinburne.
Those that have not yet divested now run an increasing repetitional risk as they fall behind the ethical investment pack, as a report leaked to New Matilda earlier this month reveals.
In the report, financial consultants Mercer warned the University of New South Wales that if it did not proactively begin to respond to the demands of staff and students it would leave itself vulnerable to a fast-building fossil fuel divestment campaign. It also suggested there was little financial risk associated with the decision to divest.
La Trobe University is expected to make a public announcement on its decision later this afternoon, but the news has already reached climate advocacy group 350.org.
National Campus Divestment Coordinator Ray Yoshida said the group is "thrilled" with the development.
"They have shown other universities that it is possible, and I look forward to other institutions following their lead," Yoshida said. "Universities have a very clear choice – do they keep funding dirty fossil fuels that drives climate change, or do they show true leadership, as La Trobe has done, and prove that there is an alternative."
Institutions with $3.4 trillion under management have so-far committed to some form of divestment as mainstream economists increasingly warn of potential 'stranded assets' in coal, oil, and gas stocks.

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