Beyond Petroleum. Or Not.

By Bryan Walsh | @bryanrwalsh | May 16, 2011 | +

I made my writing debut over at Foreign Policy this past weekend, writing a piece on Big Oil’s checkered attempts to fund clean energy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I conclude that the major oil companies—while they may make some smart investments, especially in biofuels—will never be a revolutionary force for clean energy:

What incumbent, after all, has ever willingly hastened its own obsolescence? That’s not to say that Big Oil will never change — we’ve already seen the majors begin to move heavily into natural gas, responding to the massive new deposits of shale gas found onshore in the United States. Perhaps, in the future, if peak oil comes sooner rather than later, the majors will scramble to find and fund alternatives as a matter of survival, not just experimentation.

But the twilight of oil is likely to be long, and far more of the oil industry’s resources remain focused on squeezing the last drops out of tar sands, or ultradeep-water deposits or the thawing Arctic. If the renewable revolution truly succeeds, it will still be in spite of Big Oil, not because of it.

It’s worth checking out the entire package at FP, which includes pieces by smart energy writers like Steve Levine. Bottom line: record-breaking profits or not, Big Oil is a lot more vulnerable than it seems.

One quick programming note: I’m in Hong Kong officially on vacation for the next week and a half, so you’ll see lighter posting than usual from me. Unless of course the weather stays as rainy as it’s been so far, in which case I may return against my will.

Related Topics: big oil, biofuels, ethanol, Foreign Policy, oil, petroleum, renewable energy, Oil

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