A global glut of oil and natural gas has sent prices tumbling over the past two years, and profits are evaporating. Improving auto fuel efficiency standards threaten to depress oil consumption, and fleets of electric vehicles are emerging in China and a few other important markets.
Perhaps most troubling for oil companies over the long term is the goal — agreed to in December last year by virtually every country in the world at a conference in Paris — of staving off a rise in average global temperatures of more than 2°C above preindustrial levels.
International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol has said that to reach that goal, two-thirds of the global coal, oil and natural gas reserves still underground might never be burned without some improbable technological breakthrough in dealing with the carbon emissions.
The world will still need oil and gas for decades, and normal declines in existing fields oblige further drilling. However, change is almost certainly coming.
“Any energy company in the world that makes its strategy without considering climate change policies is making a major mistake,” Birol said in an interview. “Not only a major mistake for the climate, but also for their own profits and for their own shareholders, because climate change policies represent a fundamental challenge to business as usual.”
The agency’s projections of future global oil demand include one possibility in which demand could drop more than 20 percent from today’s levels, to 74 million barrels per day by 2040, if measures are put in place to keep global warming at levels proposed at the Paris conference.
As coal burning declines precipitously and renewable energy grows steadily, natural gas demand will rise only modestly by 2040, even as the global population grows, if the world wants to come to grips with climate change.
Exxon Mobil Corp, Royal Dutch Shell PLC and many other companies are investing heavily in natural gas as a lower-carbon answer to growing global energy needs.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day