Why fossil fuel companies don’t do renewables

It’s a common enough claim, insistence even, that all the fossil fuel companies must not only stop doing that but must turn to the production of renewables. This is an idiot idea:

BP has said it expects to write down the value of its struggling green energy business by as much as $5bn (£3.7bn), as it refocuses on fossil fuels under its new chair, Albert Manifold.

The reason we shouldn’t use fossil fuel companies to do renewables is that fossil fuel companies are not very good at renewables.

Oil and gas companies are specialised at sticking straws into the ground then shipping around the resultant product. That’s what they’re designed to do, that’s what they’re specialists in, that’s what they’re good at. As there is no renewables technology that involves sticking straws in the ground fossil fuel companies are not good at renewables.

If we desire organisations that are good at renewables - and yes, sure, we do - then we have to build new organisations which specialise in energy production not from sticking straws in the ground. Further, as and when we no longer use fossil fuels then the fossil fuel companies will be broken up and sold for parts as with an ageing racehorse being sent to the glue factory.

To think otherwise is to be insisting that British Leyland should have made Concorde, Airbus should be making trains and Boeing release a line of EVs - they’re all just transport, right, and any transport company should switch modes of transport. You know, like an energy company optimised for one form of energy should just switch to another.

We do tend to think that the background error here is the usual Teenage Marxism - it’s all just capital, right? So the capitalists can just etc. And, well, no, it ain’t. As BP losing their shirts - again* - on renewables shows us.

Tim Worstall

*Decades back they were the largest solar cell/panel producers on the planet and couldn’t make that work either.