Fossilised Capital: Price and Profit in the Energy Transition

ABSTRACT

Getting renewable energies to a position of price competitiveness with fossil fuels has long been seen as a key challenge to the counter-carbon energy transition. Less discussed, but more significant to future investment trajectories in the capitalist global economy, is the relative profitability of fossil-fuel and renewable-energy production. Having recently pledged over the next few decades to decrease hydrocarbon production and increase renewable-energy generation, Europe's three oil and gas majors – BP, Shell and Total – now institutionally straddle the two energy worlds and their respective economic dynamics. This article takes stock of the companies’ announcements and of the existing investment and profit landscape to assess the prospects for their own corporate energy transitions and thus for the global energy transition more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy transition
• oil and gas
• renewable energy
• profitability
• investment

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Paul Langley and two very helpful and generous reviewers for advice on this article. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Indeed, this price-focused explanatory narrative dominates the historiography of past energy transitions more generally (Fouquet 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brett Christophers

Brett Christophers is professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University. His books include The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso, 2018) and Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? (Verso, 2020).