All legacy OEMs need to do more than just crank out a minimum number of compliance cars. They need to transition to a fully electric product portfolio. How do we know when an OEM is a serious EV maker and not just playing a compliance game?
This one is easy for me, even if my definition lacks some precision and maybe accuracy more broadly. The legacy OEMs are greenwashing as long as they are building hybrids (any kind - if it has a gas engine, it's a hybrid; my simplistic view), and/or as long as the BEVs they build are intended to be built in compliance quantities.
I know of no BEVs outside of China, Nissan Leaf, and Tesla that are being designed and built around a marketing plan that calls for as many of them as there is demand for. For most OEMs, that also means they are designing the cars with features that ensure the BEVs are at best comparable, and more likely weaker, compared to their gas engine counterparts at the same manufacturer.
The combination makes it pretty easy for me to spot a greenwashing car maker (which today, is virtually all of them).
I would say that when the RE is going to be used to support drilling, extraction, and refining of fossil fuel, it is green-washing.
Even when the RE that supports doing that stuff is reducing the consumption of that stuff in support of doing that stuff?
If you can offset 1GWh of energy produced from fossil fuels that you mine yourself that is needed in your mining or downstream processing of fossil fuels, with the equivalent amount of electricity from RE sources such that your end output is the same but you mine less to get the end output, is that really still greenwashing?
I'm with
@jhm on this one - whether reduction in ff consumption comes at the consumer end by driving a BEV using RE sourced electricity, or whether reduced ff consumption comes from the ff mining and processing flow, it's reduced ff consumption.
For me, telling the difference between ff companies that are greenwashing and the ones that are serious about improving their balance sheet is tough to spot. The first thought that pops into my brain is whether the company in the O&G supply chain is installing RE designed for them to be the primary consumer of the output (they don't need to be the exclusive consumer), or whether they are installing RE to provide electricity to the world.
The first sounds like serious intent to me, partly because it's harder to describe to the outside world (marketing), though it might be easier to explain to investors. The latter sounds like a company with little or no expertise in an area, trying to succeed in that area (at least today).
A related indicator - in the first case, the oil company is like to hire an RE infrastructure build company to design and build their system. In the latter case, I think the oil company is more likely to at least be the general contractor, as a way of showing the world their RE chops. Ultimately, they'll need to do this if they're going to transition to RE as their business and they'll need to gain the expertise.
My prediction is that none of the oil majors make the transition to RE infrastructure builders or providers as their internal incentive structure and training is all wrong (discussed up thread).
BUT they might see a path to improving their cost structure that pays back fast enough, to incorporate new build RE infrastructure into their energy intensive processing.
As a side note, we've talked previously in this thread about a move in the mining industry to convert energy sources for mining to RE sourced. The big part of the world I've seen press on this is Australia. Partly due to the sometimes immense distances from somewhere to the mines, they are big electricity consumers and far enough out that running the grid is cost prohibitive. So today, those mines are trucking in diesel by the truckload and burning it for the electricity the operation needs.
The ROI for building out a microgrid with batteries for carrying through the night, with a diesel generator for backup, is huge / fast. The ROI is so good, that pretty much every significant mine (at least in Australia) is thinking about how to get to 50% RE from 0 today. Many are thinking about what 100% RE for current activities would look like as well (frequently, a mix of solar and wind).
To me this is a similar idea as an oil company incorporating RE into their current energy manufacturing processes. Except in their case, they're not offsetting ff demand so much as they are offsetting ff mining in the first place.
