| Posted on January 17, 2011 at 4:01 PM | 
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The recent agreement between BP and Rosneft to explore potential gas and oil reserves in the Arctic has me wondering why these massive organisations are still focused on squeezing out what little is left of the Earth’s reserves rather than focusing on further developing greener technologies and bringing them more in to the mainstream.
My curiosity is why these efforts to find more oil continue when it clearly is a dwindling resource, or at least one with a limited future? Granted, it will increasingly be a highly profitable and valuable (yet increasingly scarce) resource but only until such time as it becomes simply too expensive for the consumer or the consumer decides it no longer needs it.
In regards to car travel, many people feel they simply have no choice but to pay the price at the pumps as little in the way of alternatives are available. Rail travel continues to be relatively expensive and prone to massive annual price increases, way above inflation. Bus travel would be exposed to the same material costs as car travel. The bright spot is the current trend towards either electric or range-extended vehicles that will help diminish the demand for oil. The simple bike is also another highly ethical option but not for inter-city travel!
You can perceive a future where the cost of oil continues to increase exponentially, where the cost to consumers also continues to grow and where the profits to the oil companies also track up and up all the while heading towards a tipping point where the product simply becomes too expensive. This magic moment will be a cataclysmic event for the oil organisations as their precious resource suddenly loses all value.
One can only hope that oil companies will see this coming and will be gearing up their corporations for an oil-free future. You would like to hope they will be investing in green technologies now that will be ready to take over meeting the demand for energy supply on that fateful day to ensure that a) the lights stay on and b) they do not financially collapse. This shifting of tracks would seem like a sensible event to plan for as it is clearly on the horizon. We can only hope they realise this and have already begun to change their energy generation mix as a result. I am sure a trawl of any oil companies’ website will turn up a plethora of lauded green energy projects they have supported but the level of investment will likely pale compared to their core oil-focused budget.
For the consumer the hope is that the impact of this shift would be kept to a minimum and that the resulting green energy that would supplant the oil-based generation systems would be cheaper and not be prone to dramatic price rises. Considering green energy sources are potentially limitless, free and comparatively easy to access (solar, wind, tidal etc.), this should be likely but the cost of energy has never shown much likelihood of tracking downwards, irrespective of how much it costs to generate it.
Hopefully the oil companies will be ready for the change and perhaps some new players not traditionally from the energy sector will emerge to put pressure on the incumbents and change the marketplace…maybe hundreds of decentralised community energy projects or big money ethical players like Google can lead the green charge with a more consumer-led focus.
