Production of gas-fed cars seen shrinking soon

BENTHAM

Newly built gasoline-fed cars may no longer be available by 2020, but investments in oil need to be maintained to cater to lingering demand, according to a visiting executive of oil giant Shell.

Jeremy Bentham, Netherlands-based Shell vice president for global business environment, said that as soon as two years from now, it was probable that more than half of passenger cars sold globally would be electric vehicles.

Bentham, who was keynote speaker at the general assembly of the Management Association of the Philippines at Makati Shangri-La Hotel last week, talked about the latest of Shell’s Scenarios report dubbed “Sky.”

He clarified that the scenario was not a forecast of what could happen, but rather a plausible future that might occur.

“World oil demand is uncertain [for the coming decades], but new developments and additional recovery [of petroleum] from existing fields are still needed to meet” fuel requirements, Bentham said.

“You need to keep investing to meet demand for oil for decades ahead,” he added.

Bentham mentioned this as he recognized that economic development as well as decarbonization—weaning away from fossil fuels—were among the global challenges for the 21st century.

Bentham explained that the Sky Scenario illustrated a technically possible but challenging pathway for society to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, which was to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

According to Shell, the Sky Scenario—which comes after the Mountain and Ocean scenarios published earlier—is the group’s most optimistic scenario in terms of climate outcomes.

Sky Scenario assumes that governments implement legislative frameworks to drive efficiency and rapidly reduce carbon dioxide emissions, both through forcing out older energy technologies and by promoting competition to deploy new technologies as they reach cost effectiveness.

The Sky Scenario “is feasible but very challenging,” Bentham said. “From a technical point of view, it can be done, but [it is] complicated by a social and political point of view.”