BP’s action might be a pivotal moment where the green revolution stops being something, we are all dragged into and starts being an opportunity for the most responsive and agile innovators to rebrand themselves and capture new markets.
For many people, the moment when COVID-19 became real was when the NBA announced the cancellation of the rest of its season. I was sitting at the counter of the coffee shop in the lobby of my Las Vegas hotel at CON-EXPO. My colleagues and I had been talking for a couple days about the odds of catching the virus at the show, but we all had made the decision that we would be ok attending.
And then we saw that announcement. By the end of the day, we had all decided to go home as soon as possible, and the show had announced it was ending a day early. As a 26-year-old who just caught the tail end of the millennial generation, there haven’t been a lot of things in my memory where I can look back and say, in the moment, it felt like things were different now. I was too young to remember 9/11, and I wasn’t politically engaged enough to understand what the first African-American president meant historically. But this morning as I was catching up on the news and thinking about the subject of this article, I read that BP had made an announcement about a major environmental initiative, and as I read it, I had a feeling like at that coffee bar in Las Vegas.
Since joining the team of contributors at PowerTALK News, I’ve written regularly about the inevitability of the green revolution, and that has usually involved talking about things like the announcement this month from Bobcat and Green Machine that they would be retrofitting existing excavators with battery power packs, or Toyota’s progress toward fast-charging solid-state batteries that can retain 90% of their performance for 30 years.
Those things are important moves toward the inevitable green future, and the Toyota batteries may even be paradigm shifting. But the subjects of those articles have always been actions taken by individual OEMs who see an emerging opportunity, or technology changes that have the potential to change the world, but not yet.
BP’s announcement feels different. The oil giant has declared that it will stop all oil and gas exploration in new countries. They have set the goal of cutting oil and gas production by 40% over the next 10 years. They have committed $5 billion per year to low-carbon energy production.
And in addition to creating an advisement service for cities to help them finance and integrate renewable power backed up by batteries, BP has said they will begin work adding electric vehicle charging stations to their retail network of gas stations, providing the crucial missing infrastructure that has been a major factor in holding back electric vehicles. It represents a seismic shift in tone from one of the actors you could expect would be the last to declare the need for alternative energy sources.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying BP showed up on time or is leading the charge on the climate crisis. BP Chief Executive Bernard Looney said in his statement on Aug. 4 what many scientists have been warning for years. “This coming decade is critical for the world in the fight against climate change, and to drive the necessary change in global energy systems will require action from everyone.”
But even if BP is late to the show at best, or, if environmentalists are to be believed, has been hindering government initiatives to fight climate change until it had positioned itself to capitalize on that market, its broad commitments now feel like real progress on this existential issue.
Source: Autoblog Read The Article
Source: Diesel Progress Read The Article
Source: Washington Post Read The Article
In order to think about how a shift like this from a major oil producer like BP affects the engine-powered industries we cover, two things need to be considered. The first is what the actual impact of BP’s commitments would be. The answer is probably not that much. BP produces about 4.5% of the world’s daily oil production, and they hold just over 1% of the proven reserves worldwide. But even if the reality of the consequences of climate change are not driving BP’s decision-making, some business interest is, and one would think that that interest is shared by other major oil producers. After all, BP’s share price increased 7% after the announcement.
It is the second-order effects of these kinds of initiatives that really matter. For one, having an oil company make meaningful commitments to fighting climate change that seem contrary to their interests, like committing to cutting 40% of the production of your core product, signals to other actors who are skeptical about the reality of climate change that something might actually be going on here.
It also provides manufacturers a heads up that they need to be creating products that run on alternative energy if they want to stay relevant in 10 years. Perhaps most importantly, it signals to governments that even the most hesitant businesses are now willing to engage in meaningful steps toward confronting the crisis, and that opens up a world of possibilities where you aren’t just regulating emissions levels, but developing products and systems where you can ban emissions in some sections of the marketplace altogether.
For someone—like myself–who works at a company that forecasts the production and sales of on-highway and off-road equipment around the world, the enormous uncertainty that that creates is both terrifying and exciting.
Like the Washington Post article says, it is too soon to even evaluate whether BP will follow through on every part of its announcement. They have made similar declarations to improve their image in the past.
But if they do, and their actions and investments are coupled with a redirected lobbying strategy, this might be a pivotal moment where the green revolution stopped being something we were all dragged into and started being an opportunity for the most responsive and agile innovators to rebrand themselves and capture new markets. PSR
Tyler Wiegert is Project Manager and Power Systems Analyst
