 |
| Doshi, Davis, Branco, Thomas and Varro at the round table session yesterday |
A new era of renewable energy has dawned, a panel of experts pointed out at a round table session on ‘Cost vs Benefits of Non Fossil Fuels’ at the 20th World Petroleum Congress yesterday while urging more emphasis on innovation and new technologies.
“Even though fossil fuels will comprise the largest part of the world’s energy matrix for the foreseeable future, other sources of energy are gaining rapid market share and attracting very significant investments,” moderator Ricardo Castello Branco said.
The director of Ethanol Ventures at Petrobras Biocombustivel, Brazil, observed that non-fossil fuels including biofuels, wind, solar, biomass, tidal, wave and geothermal sources of energy, can play a significant role in providing security of supply to major consuming countries and economic and social benefits to producing nations.
However, the production cost of such complementary sources of energy may render them marginally attractive or uneconomic, particularly during the low price periods of a volatile energy market price. Further, the large scale production of non-fossil fuels may have significant impacts on the environment, CO2 emissions and in certain cases requires the utilisation of vast agricultural land farms and water resources.
“Fossil fuels will be the backbone of energy industry for the next 25 years, but the cost gap between fossil fuels and non-fossil fuels is narrowing,” said Laszlo Varro (head, Gas Coal and Power Division, International Energy Agency, France) while recalling that oil price increased five fold whereas solar panel prices dropped by 25%. Natural gas has a brighter future in the electricity sector given its substantially lower carbon footprint relative to other fossil fuels.
“Renewable energy is driven by a portfolio of considerations,” Varro said while calling for a smart energy policy.
Chevron Energy Solutions (US) president James C Davis, who said all forms of energy sources are required, emphasised the need to apply innovation and new technologies and pointed out that Chevron has done over 1,000 projects in the last decade and saved over $1bn for its customers.Chevron is the largest producer of geothermal energy in the world, supplying 1,273 megawatts of installed electricity-generating capacity to 16mn consumers in Indonesia and the Philippines. Chevron is building a solar test facility at Qatar Science and Technology Park to identify the solar technology best suited for the region.
In California, Chevron is engaged in a solar thermal energy demonstration project which has been producing steam for a month now. “The new era of renewable energy is not just in building large scale solar or wind farms but finding innovative ways,” Davis added.
Shell International (UK) Global Business energy team head Wim Thomas, who focused on the long term challenge, highlighted the fact that 45% of the energy is used by 1.5bn people out of the global population of 7bn.
Pointing out that non-fossil fuels meet less than 1% of global energy demand, he said it takes about 30 years for a new technology to leave the laboratory, make an impact and win market share and used the example that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are an expensive proposition to develop and use on a mass scale.
Elaborating on the food-energy-water connection, Thomas observed that fossil fuel production is water efficient whereas water usage may double or triple in the case of renewable energy. Energy Studies Institute (Singapore) chief economist Tilak Doshi said the outlook for solar power may be more constrained while citing the dramatic cutbacks by Germany and Spain on funding of renewable energy development. Referring to the aggravating global economic crisis that curtails funding, he listed a very weak US, the Eurozone crisis and weakening economic growth in China and India.
