I’ll note that several oil majors have made big bets in the past few weeks to the effect that oil and gas consumption will continue to rise for decades to come. If we succeed in maintaining a civilization-supporting planet, people who have not divested from fossil fuels industry will lose a lot of money.
I’ve read half a dozen books on investing and as much content online. Fossil fuels isn’t that great of a long term investment. Forget recent numbers. There is a lot of regulatory risk, a lot of falling out of favor with the general public, and alternatives to the product. Even worse, the more of it that is removed, the higher the capital and R&D costs there are to continue to extract it. Even worse, with the exception of coal mining, there isn’t an obvious transition to a new business model. Even cars (electrics) and airlines (trains can’t cross water, ships slow, sustainable jet fuel in the works) have a better long term outlook.
There are a good number of possible transitions of fossil fuel assets, but they need to be done right. Refining is just chemistry and a lot of the products can also be refined from plant based oils and biogas. So manufacturing plastics, lubricants, biofuels and so forth. The intressting term is biorefinery. Also refineries are good places for hydrogen based chemical process. They have a wonderfull grid connection already and quite a lot of great equipment for that kind of work. Then drilling is actually a usefull skill for geothermal energy, which is a wonderfull renewable energy form especially for heating. A lot of offshore wind technology comes from offshore oil rigs as well, so that is a usefull skill. Petrol stations are mostly stores anyway and can easily be converted to be charging stations with a store. A good bit of gas infrastructure can be used for hydrogen, if it becomes availbale in a green form at scale.
So they absolutly could turn around, but there is more money in fossil fuels right now, so they do that instead.
Thanks for all the info! Sounds like they need the right incentive. If only governments had ways to nudge businesses to do or not do things…