Beyond petroleum?

Vernon Gibson is a chief chemist at an important oil company. Below are extracts from his interview to Nature on his new job and the company’s energy policies.

What does your role in the company involve?

My role as chief chemist is to look at research involving chemistry and chemicals wherever they occur in the company. I also maintain connections with academic projects and industrial partners outside the company.

What do you say to critics, such as Jim Hansen^(a) [the NASA scientist and environmentalist], who criticize building new coal-fired power stations?

If we just stopped burning coal the lights would go out.

Period. We’re going to need coal for the foreseeable future, but we have to capture the carbon-dioxide emissions. It’s not as if it’s dirty old coal, it’s new clean coal.

How do you see our energy use changing in the future?

The International Energy Agency projected in 2007 that world energy demand would rise 45% by 2030. If you project forward the predicted growth in renewable energy,^(b) you only get to 17% of the energy mix by 2030 coming from renewables. As I said, “If we just stopped burning coal the lights would go out. Period.”

So we’re going to need a broad mix of conventional and alternative energy sources.^(c) There are substantial global fossil resources. Then there are at least equivalent further reserves yet to find, and unconventional harder-to-get sources — oil sands [tar sands], oil shale, shale gas — on top of that.

In terms of clean energy, right now we need to get after energy efficiency very hard, and develop nuclear, wind, biofuels and carbon capture and storage (CCS) — these are the near-term technologies that satisfy the criteria of scale and readiness for deployment.

Longer term solutions are using the sun’s energy to produce electricity or hydrogen; concentrated solar thermal energy; geothermal energy, and working on improved power transmission and storage. We need to be working very hard on those now, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves^(d) that we are ready for deployment on the scale that the others are ready for.

Where is your company investing in clean energy?

We are investing US$8 billion over 10 years to 2015.

Our four big planks are biofuels, solar, wind and CCS.

We hope to commercialise cellulosic biofuels in the next few years. We have plans to develop 20 gigawatts of wind capacity over 24 states in the United States. Then in CCS, we have been running a storage project since 2004 in Algeria. We are developing a 400-megawatt hydrogen energy plant with carbon capture in Abu Dhabi.

Solar conversion is longer term: our projects here are not expected to deliver on the ten-year horizon. We are industrial partners with a team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology, who are using nanorods of silicon to capture sunlight and split water.

At Imperial College, London, we are supporting a project to develop organic photovoltaics that can be processed in solution, to provide flexible plastic solar cells.

We made a statement that we will look ‘beyond petroleum’ and we are on track: so far we have invested $3 billion in alternative energies and are on track to invest $8 billion by 2015, as we said we were going to.^(e)

Richard Van Noorden. Nature. Published online 7 July 2009.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090707/full/news.2009.645.html