Bob Bingham Can oil companies reinvent themselves

Back in 1977, Exxon Mobil hired a team of scientists to research climate change, and they did some important work, including taking core samples from the bed of the Pacific to get the paleoclimatology records of the long-term ice ages and warm periods, and explaining the effects of CO2 on the atmosphere.

They presented the report to the board of directors, which showed a temperature increase of 3C if we continued to burn oil and coal.

The board promptly buried the report, and spent the next 40 years funding climate denial. It is this type of action that gives oil companies such a bad environmental reputation in caring for our planet.

Those 40 years have been critical lost time, but finally world opinion is beginning to catch up, and the oil companies are getting into a difficult financial position. Over five years Exxon’s shares have halved in value, and pension funds are under great pressure to divest from fossil fuels, so the oil companies are in a real fix.

BP has forecast that oil consumption will reduce by 40 per cent in the next decade, and along with Shell and Total has a business plan to remodel themselves as energy companies, and use their skills in areas to which they are well suited.

One of the driving forces for changes is the rise of cheap renewable energy, in particular the switch to electric transport, which makes up a large part of the oil companies’ market.

Oil companies have huge skills in engineering, and undertaking work in difficult conditions on land and sea. They also have geology skills that are vital in renewable energy. They are ideally placed to feature heavily in renewable energy projects, and it is a pity that it has taken them so long to grasp what is happening in the world and take action.

One area that is very underutilised is geothermal energy. New Zealand is not the only country with this resource, which can supply constant low-priced energy. Oil companies have the geologists to find suitable hot spots in the Earth, they have the expertise in drilling bore holes, and can undertake pipeline engineering. Big projects of this nature are bread and butter to oil companies.

Wind farms require a lot of heavy engineering and are very much like oil rigs, especially those that are in the sea. There is a huge project in Europe to build a wind farm on the Dogger Bank, a shallow area in the North Sea, and use that as a distribution point to switch energy to all nine countries around the shores.

The oil companies have been operating oil rigs there for years, and have all the expertise to undertake the project.

The people in the oil and coal companies have valuable engineering skills, and would probably welcome being the good guys rather than being involved in an industry-wide conspiracy of climate denial.