BP is moving away from oil. It’s currently in the throws of a high profile marketing campaign under the slogan Beyond Petroleum and yesterday, the oil giant revealed plans to double its investment into alternative energy.
It’s investing $8bn over the next ten years, and reckons that it will build the largest alternative power business in the world, worth $6bn a year in revenue.
Chief executive Lord Browne said, “We are now at a point where we have sufficient new technologies and sound commercial opportunities within our reach to build a significant and sustainable business in alternative and renewable energy.”
BP Alternative Energy will be based at Sunbury, Middlesex, and will focus on wind and solar power, hydrogen, and rather oddly in our humble opinion, gas-fired power generation.
The Friends Of The Earth weren’t convinced by the inclusion of gas either, and its director Tony Jupiter said that gas is a conventional means of energy, so it shouldn’t be counted.
Lord Browne added, “Of course, what we are announcing today is not an instant, magical transformation of the energy market. It is a very realistic, practical step in a new direction. For the foreseeable future, for decades to come, the world will need hydrocarbons, and we will continue to invest in order to produce and sell oil and gas in the cleanest, most efficient way possible.”
But Tony Juniper could only mange half a compliment, saying, “This is a step in the right direction. But considering the scale of the company, this is still a modest initiative. BP’s core business is still the production of fuel from oil, which is one of the main sources of climate change.”
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