
Big Oil haters, you're not going to like this news. At a press conference Tuesday, the head of Royal Dutch Shell's gas and power unit announced that they will be making a grand total of
zero major investments into renewable energy in the forseable future. According to Shell's
Linda Cook,
"We do not expect material amounts of investment in those areas going forward... They continue to struggle to compete with the other investment opportunities we have in our portfolio."
Wow, how quickly things can change. Last year, Big Oil was busy describing their mind-blowing plans for a clean energy future, and this year ...
nothing? Well, technically it's not nothing -- Shell plans to pursue some involvement with biofuels, many of which have been called out as '
worse than gasoline.' Sure, I expected some of the enthusiasm over solar and wind to die down as oil prices plummeted $100 per barrel, but I can't say I expected a total 180.
Sheesh. To be fair, Shell never did go into full greenwashing mode, but they do own
550MW of wind capacity. Guess it just can't compete with $47/barrel oil.