[rhodomel]

I strongly doubt the sincerity of these Oil Majors but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

One of the sinister motives is that if they get enough money together, perhaps near the trillion dollars stash, they would buy the most promising renewable energy technologies already on the market and the most promising coming ones and then either shelf them or hinder their deployment.


http://www.metro.us/news/exclusive-...-energy-fund/NHFpkb---G_uWQ84NpXT5yxsLqR68cg/

 

[Barry]

Let's hope they see themselves as "energy" companies rather than just "oil and gas" companies and they want to diversify away from oil.

 

[JoeReal]

We remembered how Exxon killed the Lithium battery way back then with EV-1

Now Saudi Aramco, BP, Eni, Repsol, Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil and Total will combine their funds in the guise of climate change push. We shall see.

 

[alfon]

I believe all oil companies do have a vested interest in all energy sources. The people who operate such companies invest millions of dollars every year in research with some of that research with alternative energy sources.

I personally have no dislike for the oil companies. They make less profit per gallon of fuel than the government taxes placed on that gallon of fuel. They employee hundreds of thousands of personnel as well.

We still after 100 years need to rely on petroleum as we are still using the internal combustion engine diesel or gas take your pick
to transport goods, people and services. Turbine (jet engine distillate fueled) have been produced for now over 70 years, and we still use them today for air transportation.

Electricity would still be one of the best ways to fuel the planet. The major stumbling block is the storage of such energy in a compact form. Right now we need a 500 lb battery for the same energy has 1.5-2 gallons of gasoline. Gasoline only weighs 7 lbs per gallon.

So, knowing that electricity has no weight, the design of a compact storage unit, lets say the size of a shoe box that contains 1,000-10,000 KWH of electricity would be the idea method of storage of electricity. Have a method of quickly recharging with no loss of storage after thousands of times of charging and discharging as well.

Unlike petroleum electricity can be made by hydro, wind, geo thermal, solar, nuclear, fission or fusion designed reactors. For those that doubt this can be done just look at are past and how we have been changed by technology. We can now store 10,000 photos in the area of your thumbnail, who would have believed that only 30 or so years ago....

 

[voganni]

Actually, as I remember it from "Who Killed the Electric Car", it was Chevron who bought the rights to produce the large-format Ovonic nickel-metal hydride battery. Then refused to allow anyone to produce them. Hence the development of lithium batteries. The Ovonic format was the battery in the gen 2 EV-1. The battery was so named because the technology was developed in the '60's by Stan Ovshinsky. GM acquired 60% of his company when they began using the batteries in the EV-1. After the demise of the EV-1 Chevron, and soon Chevron-Texaco, bought the patent rights to the company and subsequently repressed licensing rights to other manufacturers and effectively stalled the EV movement until the development of lithium batteries. Big oil is no friend of EV's!