The European Space Agency is looking at proposals for using the International Space Station as a platform for climate science, ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain said on Thursday.
Indeed, Shell is an energy company, not just oil, for some time now ...
The two scenarii are, in their approach, dependant of economic and political situation, which is right now impossible to forecast. Reference to Kyoto is surprising, almost out-dated!
But overall, I find it rather optimistic at some stages, and probably the timeline (p37-39) is unlikely with recent events.
the report was published in 2008, which explains the reference to Kyoto, as the follow-up to it was much more uncertain at that point. The Blueprint scenario is indeed optimistic, but also quite unlikely I'd say. I don't see humanity suddenly becoming so wise and coordinated. Sadly, I see something closer to the
Scramble scenario as much more likely to occur.
not an oil company??? please have a look at the percentage of their revenues coming from oil and gas and then compare this with all their other energy activities together and you will see very quickly that it is only window dressing ... they are an oil and gas company ... and nothing more
not JUST oil.
From a description: "Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemical companies." Of course revenues coming from oil are the biggest, the investment turnover on other energy sources is small for now.
Knowing that most of their revenues is from an expendable source, to guarantee their future, they invest elsewhere. They have invested >1b$ in renewable energy, including biofuels. They had the largest wind power business among so-called "oil" companies. Oil only defines what they do "best".
As a comparison, some time ago, Apple were selling only computers and now they sell phones. But I would not say Apple is just a phone company.
window dressing only ...
e.g. Net cash from operating activities (pre-tax) in 2008: 70 Billion$
net income in 2008: 26 Billion
revenues in 2008: 88 Billion
Their investments and revenues in renewables don't even show up in their annual financial reports since probably they are under the heading of "marketing" which is already 1.7 Billion $ ...
this is what they report on their investments:
Capital investment, portfolio actions and business development
Capital investment in 2009 was $24 billion. This represents a 26% decrease from 2008, which included over $8 billion in acquisitions, primarily relating to Duvernay Oil Corp. Capital investment included exploration expenditure of $4.5 billion (2008: $11.0 billion).
In Abu Dhabi, Shell signed an agreement with Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to extend the GASCO joint venture for a further 20 years.
In Australia, Shell and its partners took the final investment decision (FID) for the Gorgon LNG project (Shell share 25%). Gorgon will supply global gas markets to at least 2050, with a capacity of 15 million tonnes (100% basis) of LNG per year and a major carbon capture and storage scheme.
Shell has announced a front-end engineering and design study for a floating LNG (FLNG) project, with the potential to deploy these facilities at the Prelude offshore gas discovery in Australia (Shell share 100%).
In Australia, Shell confirmed that it has accepted Woodside Petroleum Ltd.'s entitlement offer of new shares at a total cost of $0.8 billion, maintaining its 34.27% share in the company; $0.4 billion was paid in 2009 with the remainder paid in 2010.
In Bolivia and Brazil, Shell sold its share in a gas pipeline and in a thermoelectric power plant and its related assets for a total of around $100 million.
In Canada, the Government of Alberta and the national government jointly announced their intent to contribute $0.8 billion of funding towards the Quest carbon capture and sequestration project. Quest, which is at the f
no - its about Shell globally - all Shell .. these participations are just peanuts
please read the intro of the CEO in the pdf you linked to: he does not even mention renewables! their entire sustainability strategy is about oil and gas - just making it (look) nicer and environmentally friendlier
This weekend, programmers from all over Europe will be gearing up to compete in the 5'th Catalysts Coding Coding Contest (CCC'11). This year, the theme is Astronautics.
The competition is also open to online participants.
Individuals or teams of up to three people will be given a series of challenging problems that must be solved as quickly as possible.
As a contestant, you must conceive of a proper solution and produce the correct output in order to advance to the next level. How you get there is completely up to you. You may use any computational means at your disposal.
Online contestants will not be eligible for prizes – they compete for glory alone.
FuturICT, another of these nonsense-flagships.
Marek: after having read about this, I understand that BlueBrain is not the only flagship proposal that sucks. Long live the dream of cybernetics, or, apparently people never learn anything...
they used names of scientists and research centres without these actually knowing about their involvement it seems....
I am wondering what they actually reported back in terms of results? randomly generated papers?
Christos?
Probably some bored project officer "accepted" the deliverables as reasonable?
What worries me is the last paragraph by the Committee on Industry and Research (Space is in there..., all RTD is there...)
Are we going to simplify procedures or tighten more???
Because there is a lot of talk about simplification in FP8: which is not well received by Parliament/Council and co...
Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'm very pessimistic. I guess they will impose even more control, ask for even more detailed description of the results that will be delivered and concentrate even more on project funding instead of funding open research.
maybe this is what happen when there is so much paper involved... a simple phone call to one of the research scientist and the fraud is unveiled :) or maybe the "bored project officer" has a brand new mercedes...
ESA's article on the consequences for ISS:
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM6GJUTTRG_index_0.html
What is not clear is if the rocket that failed is the same variant as used in manned missions.
[Edit]
According to this article:
http://www.interfax.com/newsinf.asp?pg=3&id=268437
"The first and second stages of the Soyuz-FG space rocket used for manned launches differ from those of the Soyuz-U, but the third stage [the one that failed - MR] is identical in both rockets".
Thus the stay of astronauts currently at ISS may prolong a little bit.
Read before you go to Rijksmuseum;)
My fav quote though:
"US officials said they had no explanation for the Dutch discovery."
I could find one or two...
Perhaps some of ACTers will find this conference interesting... One of the talks:
"Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication"
[Edit] Oh, I see someone has already posted this link... a year ago. Anyway, if anyone of you plans to go, let me know - I'll be around ;-)
Just came back from ESOF 2010... I was on look for ACT agents undercover, but either they were not there or the cover was good enough... Anyway here's a few remarks from me (I could write a nice report... if you paid):
1) In general, to say that ESA was underrepresented on the conference as a whole is not enough (I guess ESA just failed to notice the event taking place). For instance, on the GMES presentation, ESA as such was not mentioned at all... at some point I started to wonder if ESA is actually involved in the project, but now I checked the website and apparently it is. On the other hand, GMES presentation was crap anyway, as after 1:15 of talking, I didn't gain any knowledge of what GMES is and what its contributions to the EU community will be.
2) There was a lot of talk about LHC and particle research (well, at least among those that I attended). Some of them were very good, some of them rather crap...
3) "Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication" talk - quite interesting, but focusing mainly on Science-to-Wide Public and Science-to-Journalists communication. Not really on Science-to-Science (as in Ariadnet). There was quite an extensive discussion with the public. You may be interested that Nature is trying to stimulate Web 2.0 communication, running blog service, but also I think a kind of social network - perhaps you'd like to have a look. In general the conclusion was that Web 2.0 is not so useful for scientific communication because practising it requires TIME (blogs, etc.) and often some professional skills (podcasts/videocasts, etc.), and scientists have neither of these. This can be run on corporation level (like ESA does actually), but then it looses the "intimate" character.
4) "How much can robots learn?" talk... very nicely presented: understandable by the wide public, but conveying the message... which is something like "we can already make the robots do stuff absolutely imp
Well, my comment was cut in half, and I don't feel like typing it again... the most important highlight from the rest is that the only presenter from ESA (ESTEC) did not show up on his talk because his department was undergoing some sort of audit on the same day :)