From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr. — August 19, 2025

Solar is hardly an infant industry, as documented here and here. And ‘Big Oil’ tried to make it economic a half century ago–and failed. A six-year-old article, “How Big Oil Of The Past Helped Launch The Solar Industry Of Today, by Andrea Hsu tells the story, one that is pertinent today given the bust of the industry (see tomorrow’s post). She begins:

Renewable energy has gotten so cheap that even oil giant Exxon Mobil, which reported $20.8 billion in earnings in 2018, is getting in on the savings. Over the next couple of years, Exxon Mobil will begin purchasing wind and solar power in West Texas, part of a 12-year agreement signed late last year with the Danish energy company Orsted. The plan is to use cheap, clean electricity to power Exxon Mobil’s expanding operations in the Permian Basin, one of the world’s most productive oil fields.

Was this economics or greenwashing? If it was economics, or almost so, the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) was responsible, which allowed an immediate 30 percent tax write-off.

Hsu continues by delving into history:

It’s not the first time economic considerations have led the company to explore the possibilities of solar. Half a century ago — before climate change was a topic of much discussion and before Exxon was accused of deceiving shareholders and the public by downplaying the risks of climate change, prompting investigations and lawsuits — the company then known as Jersey Standard funded groundbreaking research into solar photovoltaic technology, which converts sunlight into electricity.

Continuing:

Other oil companies would follow. While the amounts spent by these big firms were tiny compared with their vast resources, these early, critical investments in solar technology laid a foundation for what is now a growing, multibillion-dollar industry.

Why this interest by Exxon?

Exxon’s interest in solar was piqued at a time when it was unclear whether there were fortunes still to be made from fossil fuels. “The origin was actually a strategic one,” says Adam Louis Shrier, 81, a chemical engineer who spent 25 years at Exxon working in various commercial, technical and corporate positions.

Soaring demand for oil through the 1960s drove concerns about the U.S. oil supply. Inside Exxon, there were discussions about whether the company was becoming overly dependent on the countries that had formed OPEC.

“What if these producers start jacking up the price and our market dries up?” Shrier, who began working at Exxon in 1963, remembers people asking. “What can we do if we can’t be in the oil business at all?”

Peak Oil and Peak Gas, a mirage brought on by domestic price and allocation controls on crude oil and oil products, as well as on natural gas, was the culprit. Worst, Exxon felt a need to get out of its core competency into alternative energy and non-energy businesses.

As early as the 1960s, Shrier says, Exxon executives said, “We’ve got to diversify.” Exxon began looking into side businesses such as office machinery and word processing. Shrier, who had been in the company’s central engineering operation, was put in charge of nonconventional energy.

Berman’s Story

Hsu continues:

Part of Shrier’s portfolio included overseeing a new research unit headed by a photochemist named Elliot Berman. In 1970, Berman had approached Exxon with an idea that other companies had passed on: figuring out how to build a solar panel that would be economic for use on Earth.

Solar cells had been used successfully in space since 1958, when a solar-powered transmitter was launched aboard the satellite Vanguard 1. Berman was among those who believed that solar photovoltaic technology had great potential on Earth, where millions of people lacked electricity.

“Here’s the sun. Here are the people,” says Berman, who is 89 now. “All you have to do is figure out a way to put the two things together.”

Uncompetitive Cost

Hsu then explains the failure of solar in the energy-troubled 1970s, even when a 10 percent ITC was in effect.

The big challenge was cost. Manufacturing silicon — the material of choice for solar photovoltaics — was exorbitant. The solar cells being sent into space cost more than $100 per watt. For solar to be successful on Earth, Berman knew he had to bring the cost down to a fraction of that. He aimed for $10 per watt. (Today the cost is estimated to be less than 50 cents per watt.)

His small research team began searching for a material that would be significantly cheaper than silicon. At the same time, he needed to prove that solar could work commercially on Earth.

One particularly compelling idea emerged from a trip to one of Exxon’s oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil platforms were required to have navigation aids — foghorns and flashing lights, all powered by batteries. The batteries didn’t last long, and replacing them was a big expense for Exxon, not to mention an environmental hazard. The spent batteries were sometimes disposed of in the ocean, Berman says. Solar would be cheaper, he told the company.

Exxon’s First Try: Contracting

“To speed development of a product that Exxon could market,”

Berman looked to buy ready-made silicon solar cells. He approached someone he knew at one of the space program’s solar cell manufacturers, who readily agreed to Berman’s desired price of $10 per watt. “So I gave him a purchase order for $100,000,” he says. “Remember, I was at Exxon. I could write big checks!” But the seller couldn’t deliver. What he had were space rejects, slightly imperfect solar cells that Berman believes would have been fine for terrestrial use — but there weren’t enough of them.

Exxon’s Second Try: In-house

Hsu continues:

After a fruitless search, Berman concluded that his team would have to make its own solar cells. A breakthrough in cost came when they figured out they could use silicon castoffs from the semiconductor industry. Imperfect silicon wafers may have been problematic for electronics but made little difference in the efficiency of solar cells, Berman discovered.

In 1973, the Exxon-funded Solar Power Corp. began manufacturing and shipping its first product: five silicon wafers on a circuit board encased in silicone rubber. These solar panels provided power in the U.S. and abroad — in places as far-flung as Australia and Mali — to oil platforms, mountaintop telecommunications stations, recreational boats and rural villages where solar energy was used to pump water.

“I think Elliot’s most brilliant thing was to delineate all the markets that existed for solar at even the relatively high price that it was,” says John Perlin, author of Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy. “The real breakthrough of Elliot — with the help of Exxon — was planting the flag of photovoltaics throughout the world.”

Hsu provides the (neo-Malthusian) context:

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the energy crisis of the 1970s was unfolding. The 1973-1974 oil embargo sparked fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter warned the nation: “The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75% of our energy are simply running out.”

What wasn’t running out was sunlight. Using solar power to fulfill the world’s energy needs seemed like an ever more promising option. Exxon ran a print and television ad campaign with the slogan “Energy for a strong America,” showcasing various ways the company was working to secure energy for the country — with solar featured alongside coal and nuclear power.

At the same time, Exxon had competition on the solar front. Looking to diversify its holdings in a time of uncertainty, Los Angeles-based oil company Atlantic Richfield acquired a solar company of its own, renaming it ARCO Solar. Berman would later join the company as chief scientist.

Arco Joins In

While Exxon had brought down the cost of solar cells and had opened up markets worldwide, ARCO Solar invested in making the technology better, boosting the efficiency of solar panels, honing manufacturing tools and techniques and creating a product that was more durable. “That fundamental investment in materials, and understanding how these things behave” were crucial, says Terry Jester, an engineer who joined ARCO Solar as a college senior. “Now people don’t even talk about the reliability of solar panels,” she says. “They’re so reliable.”

Despite the tangible gains, the oil industry’s solar investments were “highly suspect in a lot of people’s minds,” says Chris Eberspacher, who was ARCO Solar’s director of research and development in the 1980s. Numerous oil spills occurred in the Gulf of Mexico and off California’s coast in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. “There was clear evidence of environmental spoliation, so I think oil companies were seen with great skepticism,” he says.

The End

Hsu notes the 1970s demise of mass solar:

Many presumed that oil companies were getting into solar so they could sabotage the industry from the inside. Eberspacher, who describes himself as a product of the 1970s environmental movement, saw something different.” Our clear marching orders were to change the world,” he says.

ARCO Solar quickly became the world’s largest solar manufacturer. And yet the company still wasn’t turning a profit. Atlantic Richfield Chairman Robert Anderson’s defense of the spending became company lore, says Eberspacher.

“He would say something to the effect of ‘You may like the activity or you may not, but all the money we’ve spent on solar so far is roughly equivalent to one dry hole. And we don’t intend to give up. We intend to drill this hole all the way to the bottom.’ ” In the end, the oil companies did give up….

Exxon closed down Solar Power Corp. around 1984, after Shrier wrote a report finding that it would be at least a decade before the solar business would be self-supporting. ARCO Solar powered through the 1980s, thanks in part to continued support from its chairman, but at the end of the decade, it was sold to the Germany company Siemens.

A Verdict?

“I’m no fan of oil companies, but I have to be fair when I think about who did what when,” Eberspacher says of the oil industry’s early involvement with solar. “Whether they did that for strictly economic reasons, whether they did that for some mix of economic and public relations reasons, it doesn’t matter. They were there. They made a difference. And that difference enabled an industry which is now changing the world.”….

A final comment is in order. Seen from today, some six years later, Big Oil’s venture into solar was a mistaken notion that oil and gas were finite, depletable resources past the point of maximum production. But once price and allocation controls were relaxed and then removed in the in the early-to-mid 1980s, oil and gas went into surplus where they have remained, with few exceptions, since. New-generation extraction technologies (resourceship) have made these energy minerals expanding resources, not depleting ones. Thus,the need for solar as grid electricity has diminished, except for the artificial prop of special government subsidies, a story well known in today’s energy debate.

Essay by Eric Worrall

Apparently our pitiful atmospheric contribution is comparable to the 2 million year eruption which drove the Permian–Triassic Extinction, which wiped out most life on Earth.

‘A climate of unparalleled malevolence’: are we on our way to the sixth major mass extinction?

Churning quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate we are going could lead the planet to another Great Dying

By Peter Brannen
Tue 19 Aug 2025 14.01 AESTLast modified on Tue 19 Aug 2025 14.20 AEST

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Put enough CO2 into the system all at once, and push the life-sustaining carbon cycle far enough out of equilibrium, and it might escape into a sort of planetary failure mode, where processes intrinsic to the Earth itself take over, acting as positive feedback to release dramatically more carbon into the system. This subsequent release of carbon would send the planet off on a devastating 100-millennia excursion before regaining its composure. And it wouldn’t matter if CO2 were higher or lower than it is today, or whether the Earth was warmer or cooler as a result. It’s the rate of change in CO2 that gets you to Armageddon.

…

Here’s a plausible sequence of events at the end of the Permian. First, and most simply: the excess CO2 trapped more energy from the sun on the surface of our planet – a simple physical process that was worked out by physicists more than 150 years ago. And so the world helplessly warmed – models and proxies both point to about 10C of warming over thousands of years – pushing animal and plant physiology alike to their limits. It’s also a simple physical fact about our world that for every degree it warms, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more water, so, as the temperature climbed and the water cycle accelerated, storms began to take on a menacing, drowning intensity. As the ocean warms as well, it holds less oxygen.

…

Now let’s pull back from the brink. However similar to this era our modern experiment on the planet might first appear, it’s worth acknowledging, even stressing, that the end-Permian climate catastrophe was truly, surpassingly bad. And on a scale unlikely ever to be matched by humans. Upper estimates for how much carbon dioxide the fossil-fuel-burning Siberian Traps erupted, ranging up to 120,000 gigatons, defy belief. Even lower estimates, of say 30,000 gigatons, constitute volumes of CO2 so completely ridiculous that matching it would require humans to not only burn all the fossil fuel reserves in the world, but then keep putting ever more carbon into the atmosphere for thousands of years. Perhaps by burning limestone for fun on an industrial scale for generations, even as the biosphere disintegrates. As it is, industrial civilisation could theoretically generate about 18,000 gigatons of CO2 if the entire world pulled together on a nihilistic, multicentennial, international effort to burn all the accessible fossil fuels on Earth.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/19/a-climate-of-unparalleled-malevolence-are-we-on-our-way-to-the-sixth-major-mass-extinction

Back in the real world, the Earth is still locked in a brutal Late Cenozoic Ice Age ice age, which started 34 million years ago, yet still threatens to crush our civilisation under mile high walls of ice – so we have plenty of buffer between us and any kind of geologically significant global warming event.

Life has thrived under far higher CO2 levels than today. The graphic at the top of this page came from User-friendly carbon-cycle modelling and aspects of Phanerozoic climate change. During the late Carboniferous for example, CO2 levels were likely far higher than today, but despite elevated CO2 the Earth still experienced icehouse conditions, similar to today’s ice age cycle. So clearly CO2 isn’t the only factor driving climatic conditions.

The ice age of the last 34 million years is a lot of ice age. Clearly something more powerful than CO2 is keeping our planet locked in the ice box. It is likely industrial CO2 emissions will fail to overcome today’s geological ice box forcings, just as elevated CO2 failed to overcome the powerful geological ice box factors which created the Late Paleozoic icehouse during the Carboniferous.

Even if I’m wrong, and substantial warming does occur, we have strong evidence humans would thrive in such conditions. Our monkey ancestors made their debut in the fossil record during much warmer conditions than today. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, was the age of monkeys. Our monkey ancestors thrived on the abundance of the hothouse PETM, and colonised much of the world, only retreating when the cold returned. If a bunch of monkey ancestors with brains the size of matchboxes could thrive in a much world, then we humans certainly could – which gives us at least a 5-8C buffer of safety against any imaginable global warming event.

Fish also did well during the PETM – so it’s not just humans who would thrive in such warm conditions.

Given the remarkable stability of the Earth’s climate on geological timescales, the fact the Earth is still locked in an ice age, the benign conditions which prevailed in previous much warmer ages, and the existence of previous ice age epochs with far higher CO2 levels than today, those who focus on the carbon cycle alone are overlooking some pretty important evidence. Given all this, I believe we can reasonably conclude claims that industrial emissions are creating a man made Permian Extinction are an absurd fantasy.

Essay by Eric Worrall

Don’t they realise $8 / gallon pump price in California could torpedo Newsom’s presidential ambitions?

Gavin Newsom warms to Big Oil in climate reversal

BY ALEXEI KOSEFF,  ALEJANDRO LAZO AND  MAYA C. MILLERAUGUST 18, 2025

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For decades, the state has raced to end its reliance on fossil fuels and prioritize clean energy. Its relationship with oil companies became particularly contentious in the past two years, as Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislators held two special sessions to crack down on alleged price gouging at the pump.

But now two of its last remaining fuel refineries are closing sooner than California expected, tossing a simmering emergency into officials’ laps. With a hotly debated forecast that $8-per-gallon gasoline might be on the horizon, there has been a remarkable shift at the state Capitol. Led by Newsom, who just last fall was lambasting oil companies for “screwing” consumers, California may soon let its black gold flow again.

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Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders are now negotiating a plan with the industry to boost stagnating production in California’s oil-drilling hub of Kern County — and avert a nightmare scenario for a governor with national ambitions and a party that has promised to focus on affordability. …

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Read more: https://calmatters.org/politics/2025/08/oil-compromise-california-legislature/

If you thought Californian state finances are crazy now, wait until oil companies tighten the screws on the Newsom administration, to claw back some of the profits lost to Newsom’s Net Zero policies.

California is learning the hard way, once you start playing favourites in the energy market, in the end everyone has their hand out demanding subsidies and special favours.