"Big Oil does not consider renewable energy to be a mainstream business. It's a side business for them."

That's the word from Michael Eckhart, the president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, in an article in yesterday's New York Times about how the oil industry has yet to buy into President Obama's green energy plans.

From the article, which was written by by Jad Mouawad:

Even as Washington goes into a frenzy over energy, many of the oil companies are staying on the sidelines, balking at investing in new technologies favored by the president, or even straying from commitments they had already made.

Royal Dutch Shell said last month that it would freeze its research and investments in wind, solar and hydrogen power, and focus its alternative energy efforts on biofuels. The company had already sold much of its solar business and pulled out of a project last year to build the largest offshore wind farm, near London.

BP, a company that has spent nine years saying it was moving "beyond petroleum," has been getting back to petroleum since 2007, paring back its renewable program. And American oil companies, which all along have been more skeptical of alternative energy than their European counterparts, are studiously ignoring the new messages coming from Washington.

"In my view, nothing has really changed," Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said after the election of President Obama.
Partly because of the oil industry's scale, and partly because oil is and will almost undoubtedly continue to be a vastly profitable business for coming decades, the big oil companies are sinking money into growing traditional business streams. Whether those projects are tar sands, natural gas, or exploring for new oil fields, the oil industry is focused more on keeping existing energy sources and supplies steady for the coming years.

In the meantime, the bulk of the investments in alternative energy research and development is coming from private investors: Eckhart said that venture capital firms and corporations have spent roughly $50 billion on alternative energies since the mid-90s, while oil companies have invested only about $5 billion.

Although ExxonMobil's projection for 2050 has the world getting 80 percent of its energy from hydrocarbons -- oil, gas and coal -- much of the rest of the world is actively working to give the lie to that future.

So does Big Oil's reticence to go green mean that they'll be sidelined in the low-carbon economy, while new players emerge as leaders in wind, solar and wave energy? Perhaps Exxon will be the General Motors of the mid-21st century, a corporate giant struggling to redefine its business. But just as likely is that the oil industry will get up to speed in the coming years -- not decades -- as it brings new technologies to the scale it needs to get a profit.

"Don't lose heart with Big Oil," Alan Shaw, the CEO of biotech firm Codexis, told the Times. "They aren't at a point where they are ready to invest yet, but they are getting there. I think in the next 10 years, they will invest hundreds of times more than they have in the past 10 years."