Royal Dutch Shell: Where Is It Going?

A year or two after the launch of 2GreenEnergy in the summer of 2009, I got an unexpected phone call from a guy who said, “Hello, Craig.  You don’t know me, but I’m — (I can’t recall his name), an energy investor in South Carolina.  Your name has come up twice to me today.  Had it come up once I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but I just got off a conference call with the executive team at Royal Dutch Shell, as I’m a large share-holder, and they were talking about you and 2GreenEnergy, so I thought I’d look you up and see what you’re doing out there.”

“Holy cow,” I responded. “That can’t be good.  What in God’s name were they saying about me?” He explained that he couldn’t remember, etc., even after I begged him to try.

In any case, I left that call worried, because I don’t talk kindly about the oil companies generally, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to have corporate enemies that crank annual revenues of $388 billion.

FWIW, I’m no longer at all tense about the encounter, not only because of the passage of time, but because I believe that the reference to me/us was probably not an expression of hostility.  As I’ve mentioned dozens of times over the years, Shell is definitely among the most progressive of the oil giants.

In particular, as expressed in this piece from GreenTech Media, Shell gives us every reason to believe that they recognize the global energy transition, that they take it seriously, and that they don’t discourage it.  Moreover, Maarten Wetselaar, director of Shell’s integrated gas and new energies division, believes his company could become the largest power company in the world by the early 2030s, amid a global shift to lower-carbon energy resources.  In an interview last week on the sidelines of the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit in New York City he said, “It’s mostly driven by the, we think, irreversible choice the world has made to decarbonize, to address climate change, and to go to [a] net-zero energy system.”  What he means by this, is carbon-free electricity, given that he perceives this to be the path of least resistance (pun intended).

All good, but let’s be a bit circumspect here.  First of all, couldn’t this be so much greenwashing, using public relations to create an appearance of environmental responsibility, with little or no sincerity behind it?

Sure, but maybe Shell doesn’t think it’s in its own best interests to join the others and simply to dig in its heels and pretend nothing’s changing, or worse, to actively but covertly stave that change off as long as possible.  Maybe it sees a business opportunity. Lord knows there’s nothing wrong with that.

On what does their ultimate success depend, given the dynamic world of energy and the way it’s morphing, driven in large measure by government regulation?  Well, how about their size, for starters?  Being one of the largest entities on the planet puts them in a position to influence the nature of the actual field on which the game will be played; that shouldn’t hurt.

Perhaps they see themselves as one of the top architects of a burgeoning clean energy industry, and expect to continue to grow through a mission of saving our civilization from baking itself into a scorched desert.

Through the years, I’ve imputed far more moral goodness onto Shell than any of the other majors; hope I’m right.  Yes, big money and big concern for the future of humankind haven’t traditionally walked hand-in-hand, but that doesn’t mean some good can’t come from huge corporations, especially when profits and progress may happen to coincide in this case.