Shell creates New Energies for new wind power investments
According to a report, Europe’s largest oil company, Shell, has established a separate division called New Energies to invest in renewable and low-carbon power. This move came out days after experts at Chatham House warned international oil companies they must transform their business or face a “short, brutal” end within 10 years.
Shell’s new division brings together its existing hydrogen, biofuels and electrical activities but will also be used as a base for a new drive into wind power, according to an internal announcement to company staff.
With US$1.7billion of capital investment currently attached to it and annual capital expenditure of US$200million, New Energies will be run alongside the Integrated Gas division under executive board member Maarten Wetselaar.
The Anglo-Dutch group may already be trailing Total of France, which already has its own New Energies division and boasts of being the world’s second-ranked solar energy operator through its affiliate SunPower, bought for £800million in 2011.
Shell has made no formal announcement so far about New Energies but the new business is expected to be revealed at a public strategy briefing in London on 7 June.
Van Beurden has not yet signaled a slowdown in the high-cost oil and gas investment that has made Shell a target of anti-fossil fuel campaigners, who believe such investments will only result in so-called stranded assets – carbon made unburnable by international commitments to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Shell has pulled back from high-risk Arctic drilling but is still engaged in deepwater projects and in the high-CO2 Canadian tar sands – although it is trying to cut emissions by developing a carbon, capture and storage facility.
The Shell boss told investors at a company meeting in London last week he did expect oil and gas demand to continue strongly but the company also took its responsibilities to tackle global warming seriously. “The big challenge, both for society and for a company like Shell is how to provide much more energy, while at the same time significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions,” he said.
The following day Shell announced it was bidding in a partnership to build two windfarms off the Dutch coast that will be big enough to power 825,000 households.
Shell already holds interests in nine other wind projects in North America and Europe, although spending on wind, solar and hydrogen projects was suspended by former chief executive Jeroen van der Veer in 2009. A substantial solar operation had been largely sold off three years before that.
Source: The Guardian