But meanwhile, Shell's web pages speak of Arctic drilling, deep sea wells and unconventional oil: long-term investments that, just like building coalfired power stations, will lock the world into continued use of fossil fuels.
The new administration in Washington is dominated by fossil fuel interests and has resumed the mantra of "Drill, baby, drill!." Deep sea drilling, mining in protected and sometimes fragile environments, mountaintop removal, fracking, and massive pipeline projects are all back on the table.
Its big gas-exploration project on India's east coast involved draining swamps and drilling deep beneath the sea.
More recently, congressional Democrats defeated and discouraged any bill that would let us drill in the deep sea 100 miles out.
Applying the new method, the researchers looked at a more-than-5-meter-long sediment core, representing about 160,000 years of accumulation, drilled from the deep sea floor off the southwestern coast of South Africa.
A huge amount of micropaleontological data is available from on-land sections, oil wells, and deep-sea drilling cores obtained during cruises such as Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) Leg 31 (sites 299 302) and Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 127/128 (sites 794 799).
Recent photographic surveys carried out by the SERPENT Project (www.serpentproject.com) at exploration drilling sites in the Faroe-Shetland Channel and the Norwegian Sea indicate a mean area of 21,744 m2 is covered by drill cuttings in the deep sea (SERPENT Project, unpublished data).
As part of the Deep Sea Drilling Project conducted from 1968 to 1983 by the U.S. government, the drilling ship Glomar Challenger undertook several cruises of Antarctic and subantarctic waters to gather and study materials on and below the ocean floor.
The nine justices refused to hear an appeal filed by Hornbeck Offshore Services LLC, a drilling company subsidiary of Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc, and other businesses affected by a moratorium on deep sea drilling that the federal government imposed in May 2010.
The Joint Oceanographic Institutions Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES) project began in 1969, continued with the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), and, since 1976, with the International Phase of Ocean Drilling (IPOD) project.
McVeagh is a mobiliser for Greenpeace, campaigning to stop deep sea oil drilling.
