The CEO of one of the world’s biggest petroleum companies says his company will soon produce more natural gas than oil and is investing more than ever in biofuels.

And this article from the Wall Street Journal says that Peter Voser of Royal Dutch Shell says he expects in the next 40 years, 40 percent of the world’s cars will be electric:

Mr. Voser sat down with The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray and Kimberley Strassel to talk about the future of climate-change legislation, the company’s push beyond oil, the prospects for electric vehicles and more…

MR. VOSER: We are focusing a lot on biofuels at this stage. We just announced a few weeks ago a big joint venture in Brazil where we are bringing our first- and second-generation biofuels technologies together with Cosan, a sugar ethanol producer there, in order to speed up the second-generation capabilities because we need to speed up that process. So biofuels is one.

We are in wind. We have gone out of solar. We tried both silicon and thin-film solar, but we can’t see that as being something that we can scale up globally and get the economies of scale. So we leave that. It’s a technology that will be developed, no doubt, but we leave that to a smaller, medium-sized players.

Voser goes on to tell the WSJ that by 2012, Shell will have more natural gas production than oil.

As we’ve talked about on these pages before, the battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation of car purchasers is starting. By the end of the year many major auto manufacturers will have some kind of electric vehicle for sale on the mass market and by 2014, nearly all major manufacturers have plans to introduce at least one electric car.

In these early stages, carmakers have chosen several different paths, some opting to go for the cars powered solely by batteries (Battery Electric Vehicles or BEVs) such as the Nissan LEAF, some for the plug-in hybrids (PHEVs; like a Prius with a bigger battery), and some for the extended range electric vehicles (EREVs with small generators on board to charge the batteries) such as the Chevy Volt.

(more…)

One of the biggest barriers to the adoption of electric cars, plug-in hybrids and extended range electric vehicles is cost. The biggest part of that added cost is the battery. In the past, estimates of roughly $1000 per kWh of battery capacity have been thrown around as a way to gauge how much of a premium consumers can expect to pay. Given that it takes roughly 25 kWh to go 100 miles, you can see how this would quickly add up.

Recently, however, the cost of lithium-ion batteries has been dropping more steeply than expected; indicating that the potential in the market to reduce the premium of owning a battery-powered car has been greatly underestimated.

(more…)