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Shell president concedes global warming debate

BALTIMORE - Global warming doesn’t seem like an inconvenient truth to John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., the giant U.S. subsidiary of Netherlands-based Royal Dutch/Shell Group.

“Shell takes the position that the debate is over,” Hofmeister, who is on a 50-city, U.S. talking/listening tour of energy industry stakeholders, told a packed Greater Baltimore Committee-hosted business gathering Friday of the greenhouse gas-blamed global warming controversy. “This country should be embracing the issue [of managing greenhouse gases].”

Anticipating that Kyoto Accords-like carbon dioxide emissions restrictions on U.S. businesses will soon become a fact-of-life, Hofmeister said that Shell Oil — which franchises 261 Shell-branded gas stations in Maryland and cooperates, with Saudi Oil Inc., the huge Baltimore intake terminal — is OK with that as long as the requirements are federally imposed across all states.

And a little more access to undeveloped oil and natural gas fields would also be nice, he said, and vital to a securing America’s energy future.

“Energy is the lifeblood of our economy,” Hofmeister explained, adding that Shell Oil was pursuing a range of alternatives to oil, including liquefied natural gas, coal gasification, biofuels, wind turbine and solar technology, and the hydrogen fuel cell. Energy efficiency — in device design and operating characteristics — was also important, he said.

“[The hydrogen fuel cell] could actually take over the market in time,” Hofmeister said, “displacing oil.”

The 22,000-employee, $6 billion-in-revenues energy company seeks increased access to the estimated 100 billion-barrel combined conventional oil deposits in the outer continental shelf and certain restricted federal lands.

And there are two federal bills — one in the House (H.R. 4761) and one in the Senate (S. 3711) — that, if reconciled and enacted, could provide this energy-securing access while lowering the price of gasoline and natural gas for the consumer, Hofmeister said.

According to official sources, almost 21 million barrels of oil are daily consumed in the U.S. (87 million worldwide), and fully 1 trillion barrels exist in the shale strata lands of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Hofmeister said these reserves could be profitably extracted with new ground heating technology.

“The industry has not done a very good job explaining what is going on,” Hofmeister said of one of the motives for his talking tour.