The future of energy according to Shell... not very reassuring...

No doubt big oil companies hold the key to how we will deal with energy after ‘Peak Oil’, and thus how we deal with sustainability overall. Given the stakes, they are likely to keep drilling for every drop of oil this world still contains, but surely they must prepare themselves for what’s coming after the last drop has been used, no?

This question made me particularly interested in the video oil giant Shell posted on Youtube, picturing the world in 2050, or at least how energy will relate to the world in 2050:

For those who don’t have 45 minutes to spend on the video, here’s a short account:

Overall the video is about how to change the current dependency on oil. The first part tells about alternatives for fossil oil. The ‘first generation’ alternative basically relates to ethanol extracted from sugar cane (mostly in Brazil) or corn (mostly in the US). The video points out a problem here: while ethanol from sugar cane is relatively efficient (producing 7 times more energy than it costs to produce), corn is absolutely not (energy produced more or less equals the amount of energy it costs to produce). Brazil can rely on its own production of sugar cane for its own energy needs, but cannot produce ethanol for the whole world, at least not without destroying vast amounts of rain forests and starving their own population (a second problem with ethanol production: it claims vast amounts of farmable land).

Up comes the second generation of alternatives, where ethanol, or any form of liquid fuel, is extracted from weeds, produced through photosynthesis or even synthetically (believe it or not, using methodologies used to produce anti-malaria drugs, if I understood it correctly). No doubt Shell is investing heavily in this, otherwise they would not have dwelled on this subject in their video (which, after all, serves to promote their business in some way). But the fact that no mention is made of when we could expect mainstream energy production from this source makes me think they are quite far from it… or, if you want to be cynical, perhaps they wait until the last drop of oil is extracted before revealing their capacity to generate energy at large scale from this source.

The second part is about reducing our energy consumption –or rather: make us use energy more smartly. Fair enough: it is brave of Shell to focus on this subject, since ultimately it reduces the need for their own products. On the other hand, according to their own projections (see the chart that one Shell employee draws in the video): demand for oil will likely grow to levels that  surpass supply by a number of times. According to any economic logic this will increase the price of oil, so regardless of the smarter use of energy in the future, Shell still looks into years of profitable business…

The video zooms in on a smarter use of our roads (through  self driving cars, with some appealing example of research done by Scania trucks) and ‘smart cities’ (with a compelling example of Masdar City in the UAE), as ways to reduce our energy dependence.

So did these examples reassure me with regard of the pending energy crises we are facing in the coming decades? Not for a millimeter. Did it reassure me in the way big oil companies are searching solutions for it? Not an inch.

Basically, the message of this video is this: we’ll think along a bit in how to reduce energy dependency, we’ll even do some research in alternatives for oil, but for the next three decades or so we’ll make sure to protect our profits.

What the story totally misses out on, in my humble opinion, is the grander scale of changes that are currently occurring, and might expand dramatically in next three decades. Evolutions such as 3D printing, the sharing economy, collaborative working tools and peer-to-peer development are, while relatively small still, trends that indicate that the very texture of our economic model is radically shifting. The very problems expressed in the video, while offering no compelling sign of how to solve them, will make these developments even more pressing. To name just one example: if every house or community somewhere in the future would own a sizeable 3D printer, what would the effect be on the global supply chain, global transport –and, hence, on oil consumption?

Shell’s message in the video forms a nice example of how to think within the confinement of one’s own paradigm, but it’s not this kind of thinking that will solve the energy problem overall.