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.