BP scientist: To cut oil use, make carbon expensive
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Everyone from politicians, investors, and consumers tout the potential of solar and wind technologies.
But even BP, a company that changed its tagline to "Beyond Petroleum," sees renewable energy as a very small piece of the global energy picture--a situation that's not likely to change in the coming decades, according to BP's chief scientist, Steven Koonin.
Koonin spoke here on Monday to Massachusetts Institute of Technologies' energy student fellows, part of a campuswide initiative to promote technology innovation in energy.
BP is perhaps the most high-profile oil and gas company to take alternative energy seriously.
But Koonin said that changing from BP's core oil and gas exploration business is a slow process, given that demand for liquid fuels continues to go up.
"We're trying (but) it's not easy to change things...You can't cut off the present," he said. "Deployment of energy innovations (in the oil and gas industry overall) is very hard because of entrenched interests."
He said that climate regulations that put a price on emitting carbon dioxide would incent energy companies to invest in low-carbon energy sources.
"The only way you're going to get a shift off of this is through a price on carbon," Koonin said. A carbon tax or cap-and-trade system would act the same way that a rise in gasoline prices has prompted many people to conserve, he said.
"The question is whether it will be high enough...It needs to be high enough to hurt to get people to do something different," Koonin said.
He noted that Europe already has climate regulations in place, and the U.S. is likely to adopt its own. At the same time, he said "it was hard to imagine" the fast-growing economies of China and India having costly limits on carbon emissions.
In his talk, Koonin listed a number of technologies that BP is exploring or funding research in, including biofuels, underground carbon storage, and various means of improved oil and gas exploration.
BP researchers are exploring under-ice drilling in the Arctic, building more robust drilling platforms, more environmentally benign methods to extract oil from tar sands, and hydrogen production.
"Technically, there are lots of opportunities in conventional fossil fuels," he said.
At the same time, BP is investing a billion dollars to establish a biofuels business and is pushing into wind power. It has also done a handful of tests in carbon capture and sequestration, where large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored underground.
Carbon storage is a technology that could be an important option for reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, but it also faces a number of technical challenges, such as safe storage, Koonin said.
BP is also researching energy storage for renewable energy and advanced photovoltaics, although Koonin predicted it would be decades before they would make a major impact on worldwide energy use.
One of the most promising research paths is the intersection of biology and energy. BP, for example, is looking at how enzymes in cows and other ruminants can sequester carbon, he said.
"Beyond Petroleum was once an advertising slogan when I came in (in 2004). We're trying to do something about it now," he said.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
Clue #2: The market will do this anyway. As oil/coal/whatever becomes scarce or its demand goes up (one or the other will happen), the price goes up.
Clue #3: Anything else is mere wealth redistribution (read: confiscation). The money has to go somewhere, after all.
Also the coal companies don't really need to fear a carbon tax, they have india and china to keep selling to and carbon capture tech to save them.
BP has a pretty secure future for it's oil and gas operations for as long as they can still supply it to the market, their only worry is how successfully can they get into renewables, essential to the long term performance of the company.
Oh!, really, renewable energy is a very small piece . Ask Why?
Not because it's scarse, no! Wind blows all the time in lots of areas, sun shines and scorches half the land and sea surface, and the tides...
So what's wrong? Well, what's wrong is not that tec or customers aren't ready.
What's wrong in their picture is that they can't put a price to wind, sun or tidal force. Wind, sun and tidal force, simply are "here", ready to be captured and for free unlike oil, gas, carbon and uranium which are "there" to capture, underground, under the seabed. Getting them is costly, so are transporting and processing the raw materials. Plus the cleaning of the whole wastes and toxic byproducts if there is any which is very, very costly. Don't talk about the pollution generated by the whole process, including consuming it, it may not be ethical...
Question, who pays and who makes lots of business, try to figure out...
Green energy simply doesn't generate the huge profit the other sources do. Only needs capturing and distributing, no extraction no mining, no drilling, no transporting the raw materials, no processing either before distributing.
You also don't need to invade other coutries, enslave them by force to get it... Armies and wars are very, very costly and someone pays... the consumers and the enslaved ones...
That's it, what a shame!
Except that the environment will have been irreparably damaged by then. Economics 101: Costs must be internalized (borne by seller/buyer) to achieve optimum output. By dumping the environmental costs on the whole world, the price of oil/gas must significantly understate their true costs.
- by aka_mythos September 23, 2008 4:18 PM PDT
- This article shows some people have selective memory in that taxation already exists based on pollution.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(9 Comments)We already have sales taxes on fuel.
We already have additional taxes on fuel to cover highways use.
We already have taxes on vehicles.
We already have additional taxes on inefficient vehicles.
Any added tax is going to be redundant. As it stands about 1/7th of the price of gasoline is paid as taxes.
The reality of this is that for the last 20 years scientist have been saying that they had to make technology cheaper. Now that they are getting huge financial backing they don't have that incentive any more and driven more by getting their financiers a immediately viable solution, without regard on the economic impact.
Give economic benefits to technological developments all you want while slowly removing them from oil companies while we ween ourselves off oil, but punishing those dependent on a particular established infrastructure is just cruel and unfair.