The big oil companies are getting desparate as their profits plunge and they're forced to spend billions in extraction costs as yields from oil fields fall. Now Shell has announced a plan to build a fleet of floating natural gas plants, each weighing 6,000 tonnes and costing up to $6 billion. The plan is to sail the vessels to 'environmentally-sensitive' areas or far out to sea, and pump out the gas before superchilling it to liquid form for transport. It sounds entirely reasonable until you think about the sort of mindset which this represents. This was perfectly exemplified by Shell's VP for Upstream operations, John Chadwick, who's pushing this baby. "This way we can drain one field and move onto the next", he told the Sunday Times. It's the old, old story - and they still don't get it. Just drain one field and move onto the next, until all the gas runs out too. Another shocking fact in the same article was that Shell spent $30 billion on exploration and production last year alone - imagine where that company could be headed if they'd spent that on renewables research.

IRENA goes to Masdar City

The new International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) is to be located in Masdar City, the world's first zero-carbon city which is currently taking shape in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This will no doubt be a great bonus for Masdar City – it’s a natural choice, given its eco-credentials – however you have to wonder about all the horse-trading that went on behind the scenes. The Germans were pushing for Bonn to be the IRENA headquarters, and had put their weight behind the Danish renewable-energy expert Hans Jørgen Koch to head the new group. Instead, the French candidate, Hélène Pelosse, was chosen as the new head of the emerging agency. But guess what? France only decided to vote for Abu Dhabi after “inking a multi-billion dollar nuclear-power deal with the emirate”, according to Rechargenews.com. So now the suspicion is that the French will be pushing for nuclear power to be included in IRENA’s policy framework. As that well-known French saying goes, “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…..(‘the more things change, the more they stay the same”).

Over 450 delegates and 32 exhibitors attended the BWEA’s sixth annual conference dedicated to Wave and Tidal power in Bath recently. The world’s largest wave and tidal stream energy event, it was a celebration of a landmark year in 2008 – which saw the first commercial deployment of a tidal stream device, as well as the first commercial wave farm becoming grid-connected – and the relative strength of the British marine energy industry. The question everybody was asking is – can Britain maintain this and turn it to commercial advantage? There were very good reasons to be upbeat, claimed several speakers. Lord Hunt, the Minister for Sustainable Development, said that “we absolutely want the marine energy sector to be a success”. The Minister also announced a new scoping exercise to study the marine energy potential of the English and Welsh coastlines. The study would be the first step towards a full-blown SEA (Strategic Environment Assessment) for marine energy devices (the Scottish government is way ahead of the game, having already produced a preliminary SEA for marine energy, and Northern Ireland is currently undertaking the same exercise). On climate change in general, Lord Hunt amitted that there was “a helluva way to go” if the UK is to meet it’s target of 20% from renewables by 2020: the current figure is a miserly 1.5%. The government is “very focussed” on the renewable energy sector, he claimed, adding that “the future has to be low carbon”. But the low carbon economy doesn’t have to be a low growth economy, he added.

There was much discussion of the Marine Bill, currently going through parliament (also steered by Lord Hunt, as it happens), which will give much better protection to the marine environment. Marine groups have been campaigning for years to make this a reality. Andrew Mill, chair of the BWEA Wave & Tidal Steering group, said that “we musn’t allow it to become an environmentalists’ bill”. Hello? I wasn’t sure I’d heard that correctly. So the marine renewables industry considers itself in opposition to ‘environmentalists’? That seems a dangerous road to go down. As it happens, most offshore installations are pretty much good news for fish life. Anything you put in the sea becomes an artifical reef, attracting small fish who hide behind (or underneath) it. Then the bigger come looking for the smaller fish, and so on all the way up the food chain. Offshore wind farms in the North Sea, which are effectively no-take zones, have significantly increased catches in surrounding areas.

There was also interesting discussions around tidal stream devices. You might have expected that there would be considerable maintainence costs involved with plonking these machines on the seabed: cleaning off barnacles, seaweed and so forth, for instance. But it turns out that in fact the currents are so fast in most of the places they’re being used that nothing actually has time to stick to them. Makes sense, really.