Two weeks ago on a cycling trip, I wore a Shell Eco-marathon shirt. A couple of the people on the trip laughed. One person said: “Isn’t that an oxymoron – a large oil company and the environment?”
I explained that the Shell Eco-marathon was a race to see how far a car could go on the least amount of fuel, and it began nearly eight decades ago. I went into the recent story I'd written about a former UAE student taking the lessons he learned from participating in the race and applying them in his family's business.
Sometimes it’s easy for those of us always looking at this industry to forget what others may not know.
Did you know:
The French oil company Total purchased a 60 per cent stake in SunPower in 2011. But that wasn’t the company’s first foray into solar – in fact, Total had partnered with the French utility EDF in 1983 to create the solar company Tenesol.
Chevron was one of the world’s largest producers of geothermal energy, power created from the earth’s steam, until it sold its Indonesian geothermal business in March. The same rigs used to drill for oil and gas can be used in geothermal operations.
ExxonMobil began heavily investing in biofuels in 2009, trying to extracting oil from algae. The company, working with Synthetic Genomics, announced this year that it would extend the partnership in an effort to bring algae-based fuels to the market on a commercial scale.
Though renewable energy has been around for decades, it seems to be a trending topic over the past five years. To prove that point, just take a look at analytic platform, Google Trends, which shows how often a particular search term is entered compared to the total search volumes globally.
Look at how the search term “renewables” has increased over the past decade:
There are many examples of oil companies, some successful and others less so, that took the plunge many years ago. Some want to see this relationship, conventionals versus new energies, as adversarial. But it doesn’t have to be.
lgraves@thenational.ae
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