The CEO of the Shell fuel company, Jereoen van der Veer has recently been heard to be mocking electric vehicles, calling them “Milk Floats
Worse still, van der Veer made his comments at a Shell sponsored Eco-rally in Germany, where the primary goal is to travel as far as possible on as little fuel as possible. Many eco rallies even have electric vehicle entrants. The CEO of Shell claims instead that biofuels are the way to go. (At least he’s no-longer advocating hydrogen eh?)
Van der Veer claims that electric vehicles have old technology, which have barely moved on since the days of the milk-float. He also claimed that the support infrastructure needed to run electric vehicles would be extremely costly to set up. Perhaps the Dutch don’t use electricity to run their homes, but last time I checked every home (with a few exceptions) has access to electricity. In fact, electricity is more widely disseminated than petrol, so you could argue that the infrastructure is LESS.
More after the jump
With a recent study showing that the impact of running electric vehicles and plug in hybrids on the grid would be less than initially anticipated, Shell’s CEO really doesn’t have an excuse. Although, his protestations that alternative electricity generation methods, such as solar, wind, wave and bio-mass, wouldn’t be large-scale enough to make a sizable profit. Ah, right. So it’s those huge profits he’s after then? He doesn’t say, interestingly enough, how he anticipates all the biofuels to be generated either. As the population of the world increases it seems increasingly futile to waste farmland and crops to purely power vehicles. Using things already in great supply (wind, wave, solar) to generate power, or even waste (biomass) seems like a more sensible way to ensure that everyone has enough to eat and can still move around freely.
Mr Van de Veer obviously hasn’t seen how easy it is to run a plug in vehicle. Perhaps the though of all those filling stations lying empty and unused with people charging up their vehicles at home, work or the shopping mall may be just too much to bear. For an oil executive, that’s probably like having the nightmare when you’re at work and realised you’re still in your pajamas…
The really sad thing for the Shell shareholders is that it’s obvious now that Shell won’t be looking at cashing in on all those fast-charge stations we’ll be needing in a few year’s time. What a shame…