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@SPete "PI cannot buy in Aramco, unless you are a Saudi."
Not yet. Might be coming.
That is true. However, the demand for oil will still be there for years to come (if we don't all die off virus), it is too soon to reflect on the SP for winding down oil portfolio, give another 5+ years. (For me anyway)
The coal is imported.
Germany continues to build coal (brown polluting lignite) burning power stations.
The technology is available to deal correctly with black coal emissions - so why did we change given the UK’s vast, now redundant, coal reserves?
Unfortunately the expected positive correlation between high pay and quality of decisions does not necessarily exist!!!
There is and will be a long transition period, the demand for oil will not just suddenly die off. BP is on the right track to use cash flow to diversify its energy portfolio in long run. Look at coal as energy source ... we are still using it now for some power stations.
TT
PI cannot buy in Aramco, unless you are a Saudi.
Agree on all the rest.
Happyinvestor, I would say to keep an open mind about it , doesn't have to be Hydrogen or lithium batteries at all cost. BP. R&D engineer the perfect rocket/ airplanes fuel ? On a side note Venezuela apparently it's not short on lithium. Perhaps this could be the right time to sit down around a table.
So, Happy, I tend to agree with you. There's so much still unproven in the scientific models pushing this.
But what's a company like BP to do? All the governments are buying in to this stuff. That means regulations are incoming, and likely at a rapid pace. If BP doesn't respond, they will likely be the first to die.
I bought BP because I believed in oil. I still do. But I do understand why Looney is going the direction he is, too.
I'm wondering if I am better off buying into a smaller oil company. A lot more risk, of course. But the smaller oil companies are more likely to fly below the radar of government regulations, and if (as I think) the world finally wakes up to this economic suicide, they'll be producing oil and happily so.
I suppose one could invest in Aramco but that's overpriced and if the House of Saud loses control and there's a revolution you could lose everything. Russia is happy to keep producing oil but similarly, not convinced that it is going to be a stable place to invest.
My conclusion is to stick with BP for a while. I expect a huge price rebound, the Looney transition isn't going that fast, and oil is going to surge sometime in the next year or five. I used to think I'd be in BP until I died and the dividends would supplement my retirement income. Now, I'm looking to make a COVID profit (I trebled my investment here when the priced plummeted) and probably get out, or at least significantly reduce my BP holding.
I am reading Bloomberg this morning to learn more about Europe's push towards net zero and I don't like what I'm reading.
Europe is heavily pinning its hopes on hydrogen based solutions but hydrogen is a notoriously difficult and volatile fuel to handle or mass-produce. Austria is the leader having installed late last year the 6MW H2Future plant that runs a Siemens Silyzer 300 PEM electrolyser to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. It's inviting firms from around Europe to use its test bed to develop new technologies to reduce the costs of mass production.
Hydrogen sounds horribly complex and expensive. For example, it has a tendency to leak and Siemens only guarantees its turbines with a maximum 3% of hydrogen in the mix. This is even before the challenges of mass transportation have begun to be considered. The West is seeking to replace reliable, safe and plentiful fossil fuels with a complex solution that is completely untested at scale. It does not sound feasible.
Then I learn that Tesla's push into China relies heavily upon a partnership with a Chinese battery billionaire, Zeng Yuqun, 52. I already know that China controls 51% of the global total of chemical lithium, 62% of chemical cobalt and 100% of spherical graphite — the major components of lithium-ion batteries. And she is home to 73% of lithium manufacturing capacity.
So our net zero future is either dependent upon insanely complex hydrogen technologies or economic slavery to China. Why is the West so keen to put itself at a huge competitive disadvantage by kowtowing to the green zealots? Have we not learnt during the coronavirus crisis that scientists can be wrong? Are we really certain that our actions can ever stop climate change? Or even that climate change will have the catastrophic effects that make good headlines?
The whole thing seems utterly crazy and I believe it is a fad that will one day pass. I fear that by then the damage to Europe's economy will have been done. However, I also dread that by then BP and RDSB will have squandered tens of billions of capital on fruitless projects when we couldn't have been investing in profitable oil and gas projects.
Happy