The Telegraph: Gas is abundant, affordable and acceptable. It's also the future, argues Shell chief Peter Voser
It was apt that Royal Dutch Shell lchose the Royal Institution in London’s Mayfair as the venue for its briefing with investors last week.It would not have been lost on Peter Voser, the energy giant’s chief executive, that the institution was the working home of Michael Faraday, the man who in 1831 built the first electric motor and on whose principles the whole of electric power generation is based.
The Royal Institution was launched in 1799, a time when Britain was at war with France and fear stalked the establishment. Would the rapid industrialisation of the UK be put at risk by a lack of access to continental markets? For the princely sum of 500 guineas, members could join an “institution for diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical inventions”. The country needed to work out how to make more energy to feed the beast of growth.
Wind forward 213 years and energy and its production is still at the heart of the debate. According to Shell’s own presentations last Wednesday, the world’s population is expected to grow to more than 8bn by 2030 from 7bn today. GDP per capital is set to triple by 2030 in India and China, which will bring 2.5bn people “much higher up the energy ladder in the coming decades”. Energy demand “could double” by 2050, with nearly all of that growth coming from emerging markets.