Shell

Shell plc
Type	Public
Traded as	LSE: SHEL; NYSE: SHEL; Euronext Amsterdam: SHELL; FTSE 100 component
Industry	Oil and gas; Petrochemicals; Energy
Founded	1907, by the merger of Royal Dutch Petroleum and the Shell Transport and Trading Company
Founder	Marcus Samuel (Shell); Jean Baptiste August Kessler and Henri Deterding (Royal Dutch)
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Key people	Wael Sawan (Chief executive officer); Andrew Mackenzie (Chairman)
Products	Crude oil, natural gas, liquefied natural gas, refined products, petrochemicals, lubricants, electricity
Revenue	US$284 billion (2024)
Employees	Approximately 86,000
Website	shell.com

Shell plc, known as Royal Dutch Shell until January 2022, is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London. It is among the largest energy companies in the world and one of the group historically described as the supermajors.

The company was formed in 1907 by the merger of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company of the Netherlands and the Shell Transport and Trading Company of the United Kingdom, an arrangement made to resist the commercial pressure of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and it retained a dual Anglo-Dutch structure for 115 years until its unification in London in 2022.

Shell operates in more than 70 countries, employs approximately 86,000 people, generated revenue of US$284 billion in 2024 and had a market capitalisation of £186 billion on 24 July 2026, making it the third largest company listed in London and the 69th largest in the world.

It is the largest trader of liquefied natural gas among the international companies and one of the largest traders of oil and of electricity, and its trading operation, which buys and sells physical and financial energy, is among its most profitable and least visible activities.

Shell has been the subject of sustained environmental and human rights criticism for decades, most seriously concerning the Niger Delta, where its operations have been associated with extensive pollution and with the Nigerian state's suppression of the Ogoni protest movement in the 1990s, and concerning climate change, where its own scientists documented the risks in the 1980s and where it successfully overturned on appeal a Dutch court order to reduce its emissions.

History

Origins

Shell Transport and Trading began with Marcus Samuel, a London merchant who imported seashells from the Far East, which is the origin of both the name and the emblem. His sons, Marcus Samuel junior and Samuel Samuel, extended the business into trading with Japan and China, and in the 1890s into kerosene.

The decisive move was in shipping. Kerosene was carried in cases and barrels, which was expensive and wasteful. Samuel commissioned purpose-built tankers, the first of which, the Murex, passed through the Suez Canal in 1892, having obtained permission after the canal authorities had refused tankers on safety grounds. Bulk shipment through Suez undercut Standard Oil's costs to Asia substantially, and the Shell Transport and Trading Company was formed in 1897.

Royal Dutch was founded in 1890 as the Royal Dutch Company for the Exploitation of Petroleum Wells in the Netherlands Indies, to develop oil in Sumatra. Under Henri Deterding, who became its managing director in 1900 and who was among the most formidable businessmen of his era, it grew rapidly and became the stronger partner.

Standard Oil's price competition in Asia pressed both companies severely, and they combined in 1907 in an arrangement that reflected the balance of strength: Royal Dutch took 60 per cent and Shell Transport 40, and the group operated through two parent companies with common operating subsidiaries, a structure that persisted until 2005 and, in modified form, until 2022.

The twentieth century

Shell expanded worldwide through the first half of the century, into the United States through the acquisition of California oil producers and the construction of refineries, into Venezuela, into the Middle East, into Nigeria from 1937 and into the North Sea from the 1960s.

Deterding led the group until 1936, when he resigned after his increasingly public sympathy for the Nazi regime became untenable. The company's conduct during the Second World War was complicated by its dual nationality and by the occupation of the Netherlands, and its Dutch operations were run from London and Curaçao.

The post-war decades brought the development of Groningen, the enormous Dutch gas field discovered in 1959 and operated through the NAM joint venture with Exxon, which transformed European energy and the Dutch economy; the North Sea, where Shell and Exxon operated Brent, Auk and other fields from the 1970s; and expansion into chemicals, coal, metals and nuclear, most of which was later divested.

Scenario planning, developed at Shell from the late 1960s under Pierre Wack, is the company's most widely adopted management contribution. The method, which constructs several internally consistent narratives about the future rather than forecasting one, is credited with preparing the company for the 1973 oil shock better than its competitors and has been adopted across business and government.

The 1990s brought two crises within months of each other that changed the company permanently.

Brent Spar, a redundant North Sea storage buoy, was to be disposed of by sinking it in deep Atlantic water, a plan approved by the British government and supported by scientific assessment. Greenpeace occupied the structure in 1995, a boycott of Shell service stations spread across Germany and northern Europe, and the company reversed its decision and dismantled the structure on land. Greenpeace subsequently apologised for overstating the quantity of oil remaining aboard. The episode taught the industry that regulatory approval and scientific justification are not sufficient when public opinion is against a decision.

Ogoniland. In November 1995 the Nigerian military government executed the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others after a trial widely condemned as a sham, following their campaign against the environmental effects of Shell's operations in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta. Shell was accused of complicity, of having requested security assistance from the authorities and of failing to use its influence to prevent the executions. The company denied complicity and, in 2009, settled a case brought in New York under the Alien Tort Statute for US$15.5 million without admitting liability.

Together the two episodes produced a fundamental reconsideration of the company's relationship with the societies in which it operated, and Shell was among the first large companies to publish sustainability reporting and to engage systematically with non-governmental organisations.

The twenty-first century

The reserves scandal. In January 2004 Shell disclosed that it had overstated its proved reserves by approximately 20 per cent, around 3.9 billion barrels of oil equivalent, and made further downward revisions over the following months. Proved reserves are the measure by which oil companies are valued, and the definition is legally prescribed; the bookings had not met it.

The chairman Sir Philip Watts and the head of exploration and production Walter van de Vijver were removed, the company paid approximately US$150 million to settle with American and British regulators and substantially more to shareholders, and the affair produced a governance crisis.

The consequence was the unification of the dual structure. Royal Dutch Petroleum and Shell Transport and Trading were merged in 2005 into a single company, Royal Dutch Shell plc, incorporated in England and Wales with its headquarters and tax residence in the Netherlands, ending a hundred years of divided authority that the inquiry had identified as a cause of the failure.

Growth and retrenchment. The company pursued very large projects through the 2000s and 2010s: Sakhalin-2 in Russia, from which it was forced into a minority position in 2006 under state pressure; Pearl GTL in Qatar, which converts natural gas to liquid fuels and is among the largest and most expensive industrial facilities ever built; Prelude, a floating liquefied natural gas facility off Australia and the largest floating structure ever constructed; and deepwater developments in the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil and Nigeria.

BG Group was acquired in 2016 for approximately US$53 billion, the largest transaction in the industry for more than a decade. It made Shell the largest liquefied natural gas trader in the world and gave it a substantial position in Brazilian deepwater, and it was agreed when the oil price was falling, which caused it to be questioned at the time and vindicated subsequently.

Arctic drilling was pursued and abandoned. Shell spent approximately US$7 billion on Alaskan offshore exploration, suffered the grounding of the Kulluk drilling rig off Kodiak Island on 31 December 2012, faced sustained protest including the kayak blockade of the Polar Pioneer rig in Seattle in 2015, and withdrew in September 2015 after the Burger J well found insufficient hydrocarbons.

Simplification. In 2021 an activist investor, Third Point, called for the company to be broken into a legacy business and a renewables business. Shell declined but announced in November 2021 that it would simplify its structure, move its tax residence and headquarters entirely to London and drop Royal Dutch from its name, which took effect in January 2022. The Dutch government expressed regret, and the move was widely attributed in part to a Dutch dividend withholding tax and in part to the 2021 court ruling described below.

Ukraine. Shell announced its withdrawal from Russia in February 2022, exiting Sakhalin-2, Nord Stream 2 financing and its Russian retail and lubricants operations, taking charges of several billion dollars. Its purchase of a discounted Russian cargo days after the invasion produced strong criticism and an apology.

Sawan and the return to hydrocarbons. Wael Sawan, a Lebanese-Canadian engineer who had run the integrated gas and renewables business, became chief executive in January 2023 and set out a strategy of financial discipline, higher returns and a reduced pace of energy transition spending.

In March 2024 Shell moderated its targets, reducing the intended cut in the net carbon intensity of energy sold by 2030 from 20 per cent to 15 per cent and dropping a 2035 target, while retaining the 2050 net zero ambition. It reduced investment in offshore wind and in retail power, exited the Chinese power market in May 2024 and announced its intention to leave the South African downstream market on 6 May 2024, including the Durban refinery which had been closed since March 2022.

In November 2024 Shell won its appeal in the Hague Court of Appeal against Friends of the Earth Netherlands, overturning the 2021 order that it reduce its emissions by 45 per cent. The appeal court accepted that Shell has an obligation to reduce emissions but held that it could not specify the percentage, a judgment both sides described as a partial victory.

Shell agreed in April 2026 to acquire the Canadian producer ARC Resources for approximately US$16.4 billion including assumed debt and leases, completing in September 2026 and adding approximately 370,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, principally Montney gas, which strengthens its position in supplying liquefied natural gas to Asia from the Canadian west coast.

Persistent speculation about a merger with BP, whose valuation had fallen substantially, was addressed by Shell in 2025 with a statement under British takeover rules that it did not intend to make an offer, which restricted it from doing so for six months.

Corporate affairs

Structure and management

Shell plc is incorporated in England and Wales, tax resident in the United Kingdom, and listed in London, New York and Amsterdam.

Wael Sawan has been chief executive since January 2023, succeeding Ben van Beurden, who had led the company since 2014 and who oversaw the BG acquisition and the initial transition commitments. Andrew Mackenzie, formerly chief executive of BHP, has been chairman since 2021.

Previous leaders include Jeroen van der Veer, appointed after the reserves scandal and responsible for the unification; Peter Voser; Sir Mark Moody-Stuart; and, in earlier eras, Henri Deterding.

Shell is owned principally by institutional investors, with index managers including BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street among the largest holders at the end of 2024.

Business segments

Integrated Gas covers liquefied natural gas, gas-to-liquids and the associated trading, and is the company's most distinctive business. Shell is the largest LNG trader among the international companies, with positions in Qatar, Australia, Nigeria, Oman, Trinidad, Russia until 2022, Canada through LNG Canada, and a very large shipping and trading operation.

Upstream explores for and produces oil and gas, with core positions in the Gulf of Mexico deepwater, the North Sea, Nigeria, Brazil, Oman, Malaysia, Brunei, Kazakhstan and, following the ARC acquisition, western Canada.

Marketing operates one of the largest retail networks in the world, with more than 46,000 service stations under the Shell brand in around 70 countries, most of them operated by dealers under licence, together with lubricants, where Shell has been the global leader for many years, aviation fuel, marine fuel and bitumen.

Chemicals and Products covers refining and petrochemicals, with major complexes at Pernis in the Netherlands, Pulau Bukom in Singapore, Deer Park and Norco in the United States, Scotford in Canada and the Pennsylvania petrochemical complex at Monaca opened in 2022.

Renewables and Energy Solutions covers power generation and trading, electric vehicle charging, hydrogen, biofuels and carbon capture, and has been reduced in emphasis since 2023.

Operations by region

Nigeria

Nigeria is where Shell has operated longest outside Europe and where its conduct has been most contested.

The Shell Petroleum Development Company, a joint venture in which the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation holds the majority and Shell is operator, has produced oil in the Niger Delta since 1958. The region has suffered extensive environmental damage: a 2011 United Nations Environment Programme assessment of Ogoniland found contamination of soil and groundwater over a wide area, hydrocarbons in drinking water at concentrations hundreds of times above Nigerian standards, and estimated that remediation would take 25 to 30 years and cost at least US$1 billion.

Responsibility is disputed. Shell attributes the great majority of spills to sabotage, theft and illegal refining, which are indisputably widespread; communities and non-governmental organisations attribute a larger share to ageing infrastructure, to inadequate maintenance and to slow response, and note that the company's own figures depend on joint investigation visits conducted in conditions that favour its account.

Litigation has been extensive. Shell settled the Saro-Wiwa case in New York in 2009 for US$15.5 million; paid approximately £55 million in 2015 over the Bodo spills of 2008 after admitting that its initial assessment of the volumes had been far too low; and was found liable by the Hague Court of Appeal in 2021 in a case brought by Nigerian farmers, with the Dutch parent held to owe a duty of care. British courts allowed claims by the Ogale and Bille communities to proceed against the parent company following the Supreme Court's 2021 decision in Okpabi v Shell.

Shell announced in 2021 its intention to withdraw from Nigerian onshore production, and completed the sale of the Shell Petroleum Development Company to a consortium of local companies in 2025, retaining its deepwater and gas positions. Campaigners have argued that the sale transfers liability for contamination to entities less able to address it.

The Arctic

Shell's Alaskan programme is described above. The Kulluk rig ran aground off Sitkalidak Island near Kodiak on 31 December 2012 while being towed in a storm, a movement undertaken partly to avoid Alaskan property tax, and the company's contractor subsequently pleaded guilty to environmental and safety violations. The Polar Pioneer rig's departure from Seattle in 2015 was obstructed by protesters in kayaks, an image that circulated widely, and by activists suspended from the St Johns Bridge in Portland. The programme ended in September 2015.

Europe

The Netherlands was Shell's second home for 115 years. The Groningen field, operated through NAM, supplied a very large share of European gas and was progressively shut down after induced seismicity from depletion caused damage to thousands of houses; production ceased in 2023 and 2024 and the compensation and reinforcement programme has cost many billions of euros and become a major political issue. Shell's departure to London in 2022 was received badly in the Netherlands.

The United Kingdom remains the headquarters, with North Sea operations, the Stanlow refinery having been sold in 2011, and a large retail and trading presence. Shell's North Sea investment decisions have been affected by the energy profits levy imposed in 2022 and extended subsequently.

Ireland saw the long Corrib gas dispute, in which a pipeline through County Mayo produced sustained local opposition, the imprisonment of protesters in 2005 and the Shell to Sea campaign; the project was completed in 2015 and Shell sold its interest in 2018.

Asia and elsewhere

Singapore hosts Pulau Bukom, historically among Shell's largest refineries, which was sold in 2024 to a joint venture of Chandra Asri and Glencore as part of the retreat from refining.

Malaysia and Brunei are long-standing positions, Brunei Shell Petroleum being a joint venture with the state dating to 1929 and central to that country's economy.

China has been a market for chemicals, lubricants and retail, and Shell announced its exit from the Chinese power business in May 2024.

India holds a growing position in liquefied natural gas import, lubricants and retail.

Australia hosts Prelude and the Queensland gas positions acquired with BG, and Shell sold its stake in Woodside in 2017.

South Africa is being exited, with the refinery at Durban closed since March 2022 and the downstream business announced for sale on 6 May 2024.

Sri Lanka is being re-entered through an arrangement with RM Parks and Tristar to operate Shell-branded stations.

Scandinavia saw the 2007 agreement with the Reitan Group, owner of 7-Eleven in the region, to rebrand approximately 269 service stations across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.

Climate and environment

What Shell knew

Documents obtained by journalists and researchers establish that Shell's own scientists assessed the risks of carbon dioxide emissions in detail from the 1980s. A 1988 internal report, The Greenhouse Effect, concluded that the changes might be the greatest in recorded history, identified the contribution of fossil fuels, and noted that by the time the effects were detectable it might be too late to take effective countermeasures. A 1991 company film, Climate of Concern, made for schools and universities, described the science accurately and warned of refugees and extreme weather.

The company nonetheless participated in the Global Climate Coalition, which lobbied against emissions regulation, until 1998, and funded and promoted arguments emphasising scientific uncertainty. It has since acknowledged that climate change is real and caused by human activity and has stated that the industry's earlier conduct is a matter of regret.

Targets and performance

Shell reported 58 million tonnes of emissions from its own operations in 2024, 50 million from direct sources and 8 million from purchased energy. These are a small fraction of the total attributable to the products it sells, which are an order of magnitude larger.

It set a target in 2020 of net zero by 2050 across its own operations and the energy it sells, with interim intensity targets. It did not meet its 2020 target of spending US$6 billion on renewable energy. In 2021 approximately 30 per cent of shareholders supported a resolution from the campaign group Follow This calling for absolute emissions targets. In March 2024 the intensity target for 2030 was reduced from 20 per cent to 15 per cent and the 2035 target was dropped.

Independent assessments, including from Carbon Tracker and the Climate Action 100+ benchmark, have found Shell's targets among the more detailed in the industry and not consistent with the Paris Agreement, principally because absolute production is not planned to fall at the required rate.

The Dutch litigation

In May 2021 the District Court of The Hague, in a case brought by Milieudefensie, the Dutch arm of Friends of the Earth, ordered Shell to reduce its worldwide emissions, including those from the use of its products, by 45 per cent by 2030 against a 2019 baseline. It was the first time a court had imposed a specific emissions obligation on a private company.

Shell appealed, arguing that the court had exceeded its authority, that a single company's obligations could not be derived from a state-level treaty and that the effect could be counterproductive if it merely transferred production to other producers.

The Hague Court of Appeal ruled in November 2024. It held that Shell does have a duty of care requiring it to limit emissions, and that this may extend to the emissions from the use of its products, but that the court could not determine a specific percentage, and it therefore set aside the order. Both parties claimed vindication, and the case remains the most significant climate litigation against a company to date.

Name, emblem and brand

The name derives from Marcus Samuel's original business importing seashells from the Far East for decorative use, and the first Shell emblem, adopted in 1901, was a mussel. It was replaced in 1904 by a scallop, or pecten, which has been the mark since.

The design has been simplified progressively, most significantly in 1971 by Raymond Loewy, whose version established the flat red and yellow form still in use. The colours are commonly said to have been chosen for their association with Spain, where Shell's early Californian customers included many people of Spanish descent, though the company's own account is less specific.

The pecten is among the most recognised commercial marks in the world and appears on approximately 46,000 service stations. Shell's retail network is largely operated by independent dealers and licensees rather than owned, which means that the brand is the asset and the property generally is not.

Shell's marketing has included long-standing motorsport involvement, most notably a technical partnership with Ferrari in Formula One dating in its modern form to 1996 and with earlier association going back to the 1930s, and the Shell Eco-marathon, a competition in which student teams build vehicles for maximum fuel efficiency, which has run since 1985.

Detailed history

The tanker and the Suez Canal

The decision that created Shell was about shipping rather than oil.

In the early 1890s kerosene for lamps was the principal petroleum product and Standard Oil dominated its export, shipping it in five-gallon tin cases packed in wooden boxes. The packaging cost more than the contents in some markets and the cases were frequently reused for roofing and construction, which is why corrugated tin remains a building material across South and Southeast Asia.

Marcus Samuel's proposition was to carry kerosene in bulk in purpose-built vessels and to fill local tanks at the destination. The obstacle was the Suez Canal, which had refused tankers on the ground that bulk oil was too dangerous to pass through a waterway on which the world's trade depended.

Samuel commissioned a tanker designed to a specification the canal's engineers would accept, with separate ballast tanks, improved venting and steam cleaning, and obtained permission. The Murex passed through Suez on 23 August 1892 carrying kerosene to Singapore and Bangkok, and the arrangement, with a network of storage tanks at the receiving ports, cut the delivered cost substantially below Standard Oil's.

The company's tankers were named after seashells, a convention that has continued.

The Royal Dutch side

Aeilko Jans Zijlker found oil seepages in Sumatra while managing a tobacco plantation, obtained a concession in 1880 and struck oil in 1885. The Royal Dutch Company was chartered in 1890 with the personal support of King William III, from which the Royal derives.

Henri Deterding, who joined in 1896 from a bank in the Dutch East Indies and became managing director in 1900, was the figure who made it a world company. He understood that the industry's problem was not production but distribution and price competition, and he organised the marketing arrangements, the shipping and eventually the combination with Shell.

Deterding ran the group until 1936. His later admiration for the Nazi regime, his donations and his residence in Germany made his position untenable, and he resigned; he died in 1939 and Hermann Göring sent a wreath to his funeral, an episode the company has never sought to minimise.

Standard Oil and the 1907 combination

Standard Oil's method against competitors was to cut prices in the markets where they operated while maintaining them elsewhere, which a single-market competitor could not survive.

Royal Dutch and Shell responded first by cooperating through the Asiatic Petroleum Company from 1903 and then by merging in 1907. The 60-40 division reflected Royal Dutch's stronger production and Deterding's stronger position, and Samuel, who became Lord Bearsted, accepted the minority share.

The structure adopted, two parent companies owning the operating companies in fixed proportions, was intended to preserve the national character of each and had the effect of dividing authority for a century.

The wars

The First World War established oil as a strategic commodity, and Shell supplied a substantial proportion of British requirements, including the aviation fuel and the toluene for explosives.

Between the wars the group expanded into the United States, buying producers in California and building the refining and marketing network that became Shell Oil Company, and into Venezuela, Mexico, Romania and Iraq through the Turkish Petroleum Company.

The Second World War divided the group physically. The Netherlands was occupied in May 1940 and the Dutch parent's operations were directed from London and Curaçao under emergency arrangements. Shell facilities in Europe and Asia were destroyed, captured or sabotaged, and the group's Indonesian assets were taken by Japan and then, after independence and a long negotiation, nationalised in 1965.

Groningen and the North Sea

The Groningen gas field, found in 1959 near Slochteren, was for many years the largest gas field outside Russia and the Middle East. It was developed by Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij, a joint venture of Shell and Esso, under a state arrangement giving the Dutch government the great majority of the revenue.

Its effects were enormous and not entirely benign. Dutch gas transformed European heating and power generation and funded the Dutch welfare state, and the consequent appreciation of the currency and decline in manufacturing competitiveness gave the world the phrase Dutch disease, coined by The Economist in 1977.

Its end was also consequential. Extraction caused the reservoir to compact and produced induced earthquakes that damaged tens of thousands of buildings in the province, and the resulting political crisis led to a parliamentary inquiry that in 2023 found the state and the companies had systematically subordinated safety to revenue. Production ceased in 2023 and 2024, and the compensation and strengthening programme is among the largest civil liabilities in Dutch history.

The North Sea was opened from the mid-1960s, and Shell and Esso together developed a series of fields including Brent, which gave its name to the crude oil benchmark still used to price a large proportion of the world's oil. Brent's decline, and the decommissioning of its platforms from 2017, is the visible end of the first North Sea era.

Scenario planning

Shell's planning department under Pierre Wack developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s a method that has since become standard practice in business and government.

The insight was that forecasting is useless for events that have not happened before, because a forecast extrapolates, and that the useful exercise is to construct several internally consistent accounts of how the future might unfold, each plausible, and to ask managers what they would do in each.

Shell's scenarios in 1972 included one in which the producing states combined to raise prices sharply. When it happened in 1973 Shell's managers had already considered what they would do, and the company moved faster than its competitors, which is generally credited with taking it from the weakest of the seven major companies to among the strongest.

The department has continued since and publishes long-term energy scenarios publicly, and its more recent work has been criticised on the ground that scenarios presented as neutral explorations of the future also function as advocacy for the company's position.

Upstream operations

Exploration and production

Shell produces approximately 2.8 million barrels of oil equivalent a day, of which roughly half is natural gas, and it holds proved reserves in the region of ten billion barrels of oil equivalent.

The portfolio has been progressively concentrated. Shell has exited or reduced positions in a large number of countries since 2014, including Nigeria onshore, Iraq's Majnoon and West Qurna, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Gabon, and most recently South Africa downstream, while concentrating capital on a small number of positions it describes as advantaged: places where the barrels are cheap, the emissions per barrel are low and the position is durable.

Deepwater is the largest of these. Shell operates in the Gulf of Mexico, where it has been present since the 1970s and where its Perdido, Mars, Appomattox, Vito and Whale developments extend into very deep water; in Brazil, where the BG acquisition brought interests in the pre-salt fields Lula, Sapinhoá and Libra, among the most productive discoveries of the century; and in Nigeria's deepwater Bonga.

The engineering is formidable. Perdido, commissioned in 2010, operates in approximately 2,450 metres of water, and the Stones development uses a floating production, storage and offloading vessel in around 2,900 metres, at the time the deepest in the world.

Conventional positions include Oman, where Petroleum Development Oman is a joint venture with the state; Malaysia and Brunei; Kazakhstan through the Kashagan and Karachaganak consortia; and the North Sea.

Unconventional holdings are principally in Canada, greatly expanded by the ARC Resources acquisition in 2026, and in Argentina's Vaca Muerta. Shell exited most of its American shale positions, selling its Permian assets to ConocoPhillips in 2021 for approximately US$9.5 billion.

Integrated gas

Shell is the largest liquefied natural gas business among the international oil companies, selling roughly 65 to 70 million tonnes a year, of which it produces around half and buys the rest.

Liquefaction cools methane to approximately minus 162 degrees Celsius, reducing its volume by a factor of about 600 so that it can be carried by ship rather than by pipeline. This converts gas from a regional commodity into a global one and is the reason gas markets in Europe, Asia and North America have become linked.

Shell's positions include Qatargas and Ras Laffan in Qatar; the North West Shelf, Gorgon, Queensland Curtis and Prelude in Australia; Nigeria LNG; Oman LNG; Atlantic LNG in Trinidad; Sakhalin-2 until 2022; and LNG Canada at Kitimat in British Columbia, which began production in 2025 and which the ARC Resources acquisition is designed to supply.

Prelude is a floating liquefied natural gas facility moored off north-western Australia, 488 metres long and displacing approximately 600,000 tonnes, the largest floating structure ever built. It liquefies gas at sea rather than piping it ashore, which avoids onshore construction and which has proved operationally difficult, with repeated shutdowns since its 2018 commissioning.

Pearl GTL in Qatar, completed in 2011 at a cost of approximately US$19 billion, converts natural gas into liquid fuels and lubricant base oils using the Fischer-Tropsch process at a scale never previously attempted. It is technically remarkable and has been a very large earner at favourable price spreads.

Downstream operations

Refining

Shell has reduced its refining capacity substantially, from more than fifty refineries in the 1990s to fewer than ten wholly owned by the mid-2020s, retaining those it describes as integrated energy and chemicals parks where refining and petrochemical production are combined.

The retained sites include Pernis near Rotterdam, among the largest in Europe; Deer Park and Norco in the United States, although the Deer Park refinery was sold to Pemex in 2022 while the chemical plant was retained; Scotford in Alberta; Rheinland in Germany; and the Shell Polymers complex at Monaca in Pennsylvania, opened in 2022, which converts ethane from Appalachian shale gas into polyethylene.

Pulau Bukom in Singapore, for decades among the company's most significant assets, was sold in 2024. Stanlow in England was sold in 2011, Durban in South Africa has been closed since March 2022, and the Convent refinery in Louisiana was closed in 2020.

The strategy reflects a general industry judgement that refining is a low-margin business exposed to declining transport fuel demand, and that a refinery worth keeping is one attached to a chemical plant that can absorb its output.

Chemicals

Shell Chemicals produces ethylene, propylene, styrene, phenol, detergent alcohols and polyethylene, with plants in the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, the United States, Canada and China through joint ventures including CNOOC and Shell Petrochemicals at Huizhou.

The strategic argument for chemicals is that petrochemical demand is expected to grow while transport fuel demand declines, so that the barrels a producer cannot sell as fuel can be sold as feedstock. The counter-argument is that petrochemical capacity has been built faster than demand has grown, particularly in China, and margins have been poor since 2022.

Marketing and retail

Shell's retail network of approximately 46,000 sites is the largest of any oil company and is the part of the business most people encounter.

The great majority of sites are operated by dealers or licensees rather than by Shell, which means the business is a brand, a fuel supply arrangement and a convenience retail proposition rather than a property portfolio. Convenience retail, the shop rather than the pump, produces a very large share of the margin, and Shell has invested in it heavily, including through the acquisition of the Landmark and other chains.

Electric vehicle charging was added through NewMotion, acquired in 2017, and Greenlots, and Shell has installed chargers at service stations and operated dedicated sites, while reducing the ambition of the programme from 2023.

Lubricants is a business in which Shell has been the global leader for many years, selling under the Helix, Rimula and Tellus brands, with blending plants worldwide and a substantial position in automotive and industrial applications. It is high-margin, low-capital and considerably less exposed to the energy transition than fuel, since machinery requires lubrication whatever drives it.

Aviation and marine fuels, bitumen and sulphur complete the marketing portfolio.

Financial history

Shell's revenue has moved with the oil price and with the scope of its trading. It reported approximately US$471 billion in 2014, US$180 billion in the pandemic year of 2020, US$381 billion in 2022 when European gas prices reached unprecedented levels, and US$284 billion in 2024.

Earnings have been correspondingly volatile. The company recorded a loss of approximately US$21.7 billion in 2020, driven by impairments as it wrote down the value of assets against lower long-term price assumptions, and adjusted earnings of approximately US$39.9 billion in 2022, the highest in its history and a figure that produced substantial political comment in Europe and the imposition of windfall taxes in several countries.

The dividend was cut in April 2020 for the first time since the Second World War, by approximately two-thirds, a decision that was regarded as unthinkable beforehand and that the company judged necessary to preserve its balance sheet. It has been rebuilt since, alongside very large share repurchases, which have become the principal means of returning capital because buying back shares does not create an expectation of continuation.

Capital expenditure has been held to approximately US$20 billion to US$22 billion a year under Sawan, substantially below the levels of the 2010s, and the company has targeted debt reduction and shareholder distributions above growth.

Technology and research

Shell operates research centres at Amsterdam, Bangalore and Houston, with smaller facilities elsewhere, and its technical contributions extend well beyond its own operations.

Catalysis has been a long-standing strength. The Shell higher olefin process, the SMPO route to styrene and propylene oxide, and the Fischer-Tropsch catalysis underlying Pearl GTL are each licensed widely, and Shell Catalysts and Technologies sells catalysts and process licences to competitors.

Subsea and deepwater engineering has produced a series of firsts, including tension leg platforms, spar platforms, the Perdido and Stones developments in very deep water, and the subsea processing that allows production without a surface facility.

Seismic and reservoir modelling have been areas of substantial investment, and Shell was an early large user of high-performance computing for seismic imaging.

Carbon capture work includes the Quest facility in Alberta, operating since 2015 and capturing over a million tonnes a year from hydrogen production at the Scotford upgrader, and the Northern Lights project in Norway with Equinor and TotalEnergies, which stores carbon dioxide under the North Sea on a commercial basis for third parties.

Biofuels research covers used cooking oil and waste-based renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel, with a large facility at the Rotterdam energy and chemicals park, and the company has a long-standing position in Brazilian ethanol through the Raízen joint venture with Cosan, which is among the largest sugar and ethanol producers in the world.

Hydrogen work includes electrolyser projects in the Netherlands and China and the REFHYNE project at Rheinland, and the ambition has been reduced since 2023 in line with the wider industry's reassessment of hydrogen's near-term economics.

Shell also funds a substantial external research programme through university partnerships and through the GameChanger scheme, which provides small amounts of funding to external inventors with ideas relevant to energy, and which has operated since 1996.

Workforce and culture

Shell employs approximately 86,000 people in more than 70 countries, a figure reduced from around 100,000 a decade ago through divestment and restructuring, including a programme announced in 2020 that removed approximately 9,000 positions.

The company's internal culture has historically been described as engineering-led, consensual and slow, characteristics that followed from the dual structure and from a matrix organisation that required agreement across geography, business and function. Successive chief executives have attempted to simplify it, and Sawan's reorganisation from 2023 reduced management layers and consolidated the upstream and integrated gas businesses under single leadership.

Shell's graduate recruitment and technical training have been regarded as among the best in the industry, and its alumni run a considerable number of other energy companies. Its long-standing practice of moving staff between countries produced an unusually international senior management, and the current chief executive, born in Beirut and raised in Canada and elsewhere, is characteristic.

The company has faced internal tension over climate strategy. A group of employees resigned publicly in 2021, and the former head of safety and environment, Caroline Dennett, resigned publicly in 2022 stating that the company was causing extreme harm and that its claims about reducing emissions were not supported by its investment. Shell responded that it disagreed with the characterisation and that its targets were public and audited.

Governance and ownership

Shell plc has a single class of ordinary shares, listed in London, Amsterdam and New York, the last as American depositary shares.

The largest holders are the institutional index managers, principally BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, together with Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund and which votes actively on climate matters.

Shareholder resolutions on climate, filed principally by the Dutch group Follow This, have been put to the annual meeting repeatedly since 2016. Support peaked at approximately 30 per cent in 2021 and has fallen since, to around 18 per cent in 2024 and lower subsequently, as institutional investors have moved away from supporting such resolutions.

The board has been chaired by Andrew Mackenzie since 2021 and includes directors with backgrounds in energy, finance, chemicals and public policy. Executive pay has been a recurring subject of shareholder dissent, particularly in years of very high profits.

The company's annual general meetings have been disrupted repeatedly by climate protesters, including in 2023 when the meeting in London was delayed for more than an hour.

Historical leadership

The group was led for its first three decades by Henri Deterding, managing director from 1900 and chairman until 1936, whose combination of commercial judgement and political sympathies makes him among the more difficult figures in corporate history.

Post-war leadership operated through a committee of managing directors with a chairman drawn from it, an arrangement that reflected the dual structure and that diffused authority. John Loudon led the group through the 1950s and 1960s, Gerrit Wagner and Lo van Wachem through the following decades, and Sir Mark Moody-Stuart from 1998 to 2001, whose tenure followed Brent Spar and Ogoniland and who was responsible for much of the company's subsequent approach to social and environmental reporting.

Sir Philip Watts was removed in 2004 over the reserves overstatement. Jeroen van der Veer unified the company in 2005. Peter Voser led from 2009 to 2013, Ben van Beurden from 2014 to 2022, conducting the BG acquisition, the 2020 dividend cut and the initial net zero commitment, and Wael Sawan from January 2023.

Timeline

1833 Marcus Samuel opens a shop in London selling seashells and curios.
1890 The Royal Dutch Company is chartered.
1892 The Murex becomes the first tanker to pass through the Suez Canal on 23 August.
1897 The Shell Transport and Trading Company is formed.
1907 Royal Dutch and Shell merge, 60-40.
1912 Shell enters the United States.
1929 Brunei Shell Petroleum is established.
1936 Henri Deterding resigns.
1959 Groningen is discovered.
1971 Raymond Loewy redesigns the pecten.
1973 The oil shock vindicates the scenario planning method.
1995 Brent Spar is abandoned under public pressure; Ken Saro-Wiwa is executed in November.
2004 Reserves are overstated by approximately 20 per cent; Sir Philip Watts is removed.
2005 The dual structure is unified into Royal Dutch Shell plc.
2011 Pearl GTL is completed in Qatar.
2012 The Kulluk rig runs aground off Alaska on 31 December.
2015 Arctic drilling is abandoned in September.
2016 BG Group is acquired for approximately US$53 billion.
2020 A loss of approximately US$21.7 billion is reported; the dividend is cut for the first time since the Second World War.
2021 The Hague District Court orders a 45 per cent emissions reduction in May; the Permian assets are sold to ConocoPhillips.
2022 The name changes to Shell plc and the headquarters moves entirely to London in January; withdrawal from Russia begins in February; adjusted earnings reach approximately US$39.9 billion.
2023 Wael Sawan becomes chief executive in January; Groningen production ends.
2024 Targets are moderated in March; exit from the Chinese power and South African downstream markets is announced in May; the Hague Court of Appeal overturns the emissions order in November.
2026 ARC Resources is acquired for approximately US$16.4 billion, completing in September; market capitalisation reaches £186 billion in July.

Trading

Shell's trading operation is among the largest in the world and is not well understood outside the industry.

The company trades crude oil, refined products, liquefied natural gas, pipeline gas, power, environmental products and the derivatives associated with each. It trades its own production and third-party volumes, and the scale of the third-party activity greatly exceeds its own output: Shell sells more oil and far more gas than it produces.

The business exists because Shell has physical assets, refineries, terminals, ships and pipelines, that give it optionality no purely financial trader possesses. A cargo can be delivered to one of several destinations, stored, blended or processed, and the ability to choose is worth money. Trading also provides information: a company that sees flows into and out of dozens of markets knows things about supply and demand that are not otherwise available.

The results are volatile and generally very good, and they are the reason Shell's earnings in disrupted markets, notably 2022, exceeded what its production alone would suggest. The trading business is also opaque; disclosure is limited, and the sums involved have prompted periodic calls for more transparency.

Alternative energy

Shell's engagement with energy other than oil and gas has run through several cycles of expansion and retreat, and the pattern is consistent enough to be characteristic.

It invested in solar manufacturing in the 1990s and 2000s and sold the business in 2006. It invested in wind, including onshore American projects, and reduced the position. It re-entered from 2016 under a New Energies division, acquiring the electric vehicle charging networks NewMotion and Greenlots, the retail electricity supplier First Utility, which became Shell Energy, the Indian solar developer Sprng Energy, the Danish biogas producer Nature Energy for approximately US$2 billion in 2023, and taking positions in offshore wind consortia in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

From 2023 the direction reversed again. Shell reduced its offshore wind ambitions, withdrew from several projects including the Atlantic Shores development off New Jersey, sold its European and Australian retail electricity businesses, exited the Chinese power market and reduced hydrogen spending, while retaining biofuels, where it operates one of the largest facilities in Europe at Rotterdam, carbon capture, including the Quest project in Canada, and electric vehicle charging in selected markets.

The company's stated reasoning is that it invests where it can earn returns comparable to those available in oil and gas, and that renewable electricity generally cannot. The criticism is that this is a choice rather than a fact, that the returns reflect the risk the company is willing to accept, and that an energy company unwilling to accept lower returns in a growing business will end as an oil company in a shrinking one.

Liquefied natural gas explained

Shell's most distinctive business is worth explaining, because its economics are unlike those of oil and because they determine much of the company's current strategy.

Natural gas is mostly methane and occupies about 600 times the volume of the equivalent energy in liquid form at atmospheric temperature. It is therefore economic to move by pipeline over land and uneconomic to move by ship, which is why gas markets were regional for most of the twentieth century: gas in Texas and gas in Qatar had almost nothing to do with each other.

Liquefaction changes this. Cooling methane to approximately minus 162 degrees Celsius condenses it, and it can then be carried in insulated tanks aboard purpose-built vessels, regasified at the destination and fed into a pipeline network. A liquefaction plant costs many billions of dollars, takes years to build and must run at high utilisation to earn a return, which is why the projects are financed against long-term contracts before construction begins.

Three features follow.

Contract structure. Historically LNG was sold on twenty-year contracts indexed to the oil price, with destination clauses preventing resale, because the buyers needed supply security and the sellers needed financing security. The market has moved toward shorter contracts, hub-based pricing and free destination, which creates a spot market and therefore an opportunity for a trader with ships and flexible supply. This is the change Shell positioned for with the BG acquisition.

Optionality. A cargo that can be delivered to Europe, Japan, China or India is worth more than one that must go to a specific terminal, because prices in those markets diverge. Shell's portfolio of supply, ships and regasification capacity gives it that optionality at a scale nobody else in the private sector has.

The 2022 test. When Russian pipeline gas to Europe was curtailed, European buyers competed for LNG cargoes against Asian buyers, prices in Europe rose to levels approximately ten times historical norms, and cargoes were redirected in transit. Shell's earnings in that year reflected the value of holding flexible supply in a market that had suddenly become global and short, and it was the clearest demonstration of what the business is for.

The environmental argument for gas is that burning it produces roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal for the same electricity, so that substitution reduces emissions, and that it complements intermittent renewable generation. The counter-argument is that methane leaked at any point between the wellhead and the burner is a greenhouse gas approximately 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over twenty years, so that the advantage depends entirely on leakage rates, which are poorly measured and which satellite observation has repeatedly found to be higher than reported. Shell participates in the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership and reports its own methane intensity, and the industry-wide measurement problem is unresolved.

Regional operations continued

Middle East

Qatar is Shell's single largest source of liquefied natural gas, through Qatargas 4 and the Pearl gas-to-liquids venture with QatarEnergy, and Shell joined the North Field East and South expansions which will make Qatar the largest LNG exporter by a wide margin.

Oman hosts Petroleum Development Oman, in which Shell holds 34 per cent and the state the majority, producing the great majority of Omani oil, together with Oman LNG.

Iraq saw Shell exit the Majnoon and West Qurna oil fields while retaining the Basrah Gas Company, a venture capturing gas previously flared at southern oil fields, which is among the larger emissions reduction projects in the industry.

Iran was exited in 2018 following the reimposition of American sanctions.

Americas

United States. Shell Oil Company was a separately listed American subsidiary until 1985, when the group bought out the minority, and it retains a substantial position: Gulf of Mexico deepwater, the Monaca petrochemical complex, refining and chemicals at Norco and Deer Park, retail under the Shell brand through licensees, and trading operations in Houston. Shell USA's Permian position was sold in 2021.

Canada includes the Scotford upgrader and refinery with the Quest carbon capture facility, the LNG Canada project at Kitimat which began exporting in 2025, and the greatly expanded Montney gas position following the ARC Resources acquisition.

Brazil is among the most important growth positions, built on the BG interests in the pre-salt fields, where Shell is a partner to Petrobras in Lula, Sapinhoá, Libra and others. Pre-salt oil sits beneath a thick layer of salt under deep water and required a combination of seismic imaging through salt and deepwater drilling that was not available a generation ago.

Argentina includes a Vaca Muerta shale position and, historically, a refining and retail business sold in 2018.

Mexico bought Shell's share of the Deer Park refinery in 2022 while Shell retained the adjacent chemical plant.

Trinidad and Tobago hosts Atlantic LNG and a substantial gas production position supplying it.

Africa

Nigeria is described above. Shell retains the deepwater Bonga field and Nigeria LNG after selling the onshore joint venture in 2025.

Egypt includes offshore gas positions in the Nile Delta acquired with BG.

South Africa is being exited downstream; Shell's upstream exploration off the Wild Coast was blocked by courts in 2022 following applications by communities and environmental groups concerning consultation and marine impacts.

Tanzania holds an undeveloped gas position acquired with BG that has awaited a liquefaction decision for more than a decade.

Asia-Pacific

Australia includes Prelude, the Queensland Curtis LNG project from BG, interests in Gorgon and the North West Shelf, and the Arrow Energy joint venture with PetroChina.

Malaysia and Brunei remain long-standing production and LNG positions.

Philippines includes the Malampaya gas field, in which Shell sold its interest in 2021, and a retail network.

India includes the Hazira liquefied natural gas terminal, lubricants manufacturing and a growing retail presence, and Shell has identified it as a principal growth market for gas.

Indonesia was where Royal Dutch began, and Shell's assets there were nationalised in 1965; it has since operated retail and lubricants and holds an interest in the undeveloped Masela gas block which it agreed to sell in 2023.

Singapore hosted Pulau Bukom, sold in 2024, and remains a major trading centre for the company.

China includes chemicals joint ventures at Huizhou with CNOOC, lubricants manufacturing, retail through joint ventures and a trading operation, with the power business exited in May 2024.

Reception

Shell's public standing differs sharply by constituency and by country.

In the United Kingdom it is among the largest companies, a very substantial contributor to pension fund returns through its dividend, and a standing target of climate campaigning, with its annual meeting regularly disrupted and its cultural sponsorships largely ended.

In the Netherlands the relationship has soured. The Groningen earthquakes, the parliamentary inquiry's findings, and the departure to London in 2022 ended a century in which the company had been a national institution.

In Nigeria opinion is divided along lines that correspond to the distribution of the revenue, and the company's relationship with the Delta communities remains the most difficult it has anywhere.

In the financial markets Shell has traded at a discount to its American peers for most of the past decade, which the company attributes to the European listing and to investor restrictions on fossil fuels, and which it has cited when considering, and publicly declining, a move of its primary listing to New York.

Within the industry the company is respected technically and regarded as commercially shrewd, and the BG acquisition in particular is treated as among the better-judged large transactions in the sector's history.

Competition and the industry

Shell is one of a small group of vertically integrated international oil companies, conventionally called the supermajors, comprising ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and TotalEnergies, sometimes with ConocoPhillips or Eni added.

Their common characteristic is that they operate across the whole chain, from exploration to the retail forecourt, and that they hold the technical capability for the most difficult projects. Their common difficulty is that the resources they can access have narrowed: the largest and cheapest reserves belong to national oil companies including Saudi Aramco, the National Iranian Oil Company, Petróleos de Venezuela, Kuwait Petroleum, ADNOC and the Chinese state companies, which together control the great majority of the world's conventional reserves and which no longer need foreign partners to develop them.

The international companies therefore compete for the resources that are technically difficult, politically complicated or both: deepwater, Arctic, unconventional, liquefied natural gas and enhanced recovery. This is the reason for Shell's concentration on deepwater and gas.

ExxonMobil is the largest of the group and the most consistent strategically, having declined to commit to the energy transition to the degree its European peers did and having been substantially vindicated financially in the period since 2021.

BP pursued the most ambitious transition strategy under Bernard Looney from 2020, committing to reduce oil and gas production by 40 per cent, and reversed it substantially from 2023 under Murray Auchincloss following poor returns and activist pressure from Elliott. Its valuation fell far enough that its independence has been questioned, and Shell issued a statement in 2025 under British takeover rules that it did not intend to bid.

TotalEnergies has pursued a middle course, investing substantially in electricity and renewables while expanding oil and gas, and has been the strongest performer among the European companies.

Chevron has followed a strategy similar to Exxon's and acquired Hess in a contested process concluded in 2024.

The national oil companies compete increasingly outside their own countries, with Aramco buying refining and chemicals internationally, ADNOC acquiring European chemical and gas businesses, and the Chinese companies developing resources across Africa, Central Asia and Latin America.

The independents and shale producers in the United States transformed the market from 2008 by adding several million barrels a day of supply from a source the majors had largely dismissed, and their consolidation since 2023 has produced companies of comparable scale to the majors in production if not in scope.

The energy transition question

The strategic question facing Shell is the most consequential in corporate strategy and it has no agreed answer, which is why the European majors have changed direction repeatedly.

The case for transition is that demand for the company's principal product will decline, that a business which does not build a position in what replaces it will shrink, that the skills in project management, trading and operations transfer, and that the capital markets will eventually reprice companies whose assets have no future.

The case against is arithmetic. Returns on renewable electricity generation are in the high single digits and are set by auction; returns on oil and gas projects have historically been in the high teens or better. A company that redeploys capital from the second to the first reduces its earnings, its dividend and its share price in order to build a business it has no particular advantage in, and its shareholders can buy renewable generation directly if they want it.

The evidence so far favours the second argument financially. The European companies that committed most, BP and to a lesser extent Shell, underperformed the American companies that did not, and both have reduced their commitments. The companies' own scenario work indicates that oil demand plateaus rather than collapsing, that gas demand grows for some decades, and that the transition proceeds fastest in electricity generation, which is a market oil companies do not occupy.

The counter-evidence is that a plateau is not a permanent business, that the assets have decades-long lives, and that the assessment depends on policy that can change abruptly.

Shell's current position, stated more plainly than most, is that it will invest in what earns adequate returns, that it will supply the energy the world buys, and that the pace of the transition is a matter for governments and customers rather than for it. This is a defensible commercial position and an evasion of the argument that the company's own scientists made internally in 1988.

Safety and operations

Oil and gas operations are hazardous and the industry's safety record is measured closely.

Shell reports personal safety, measured by injuries per hours worked, and process safety, measured by unplanned releases of hazardous material, and its figures have generally been among the better in the industry, with the number of tier one process safety events in the low tens annually across an operation of its size.

Fatalities occur and are reported. The great majority involve contractors rather than employees and occur in road transport, construction and marine operations rather than in the processes most associated with danger.

Major incidents in the company's history include the 1988 Shell Norco refinery explosion in Louisiana which killed seven; the 2001 Shell Deer Park incident; repeated pipeline explosions and fires in the Niger Delta, several associated with illegal tapping; the 2004 Nigerian barge incident; and the Moerdijk chemical plant explosion in the Netherlands in 2014.

The industry's defining disasters, Piper Alpha in 1988 and Deepwater Horizon in 2010, involved Occidental and BP respectively, and both changed regulation and practice across the sector, including at Shell, which substantially revised its well control and barrier management practices after 2010.

Decommissioning has become a large and growing activity. The removal of North Sea platforms including the Brent field's four structures, which involved lifting topsides weighing more than 20,000 tonnes in single pieces using the purpose-built vessel Pioneering Spirit, is among the largest offshore engineering exercises ever conducted, and the company applied to leave the concrete gravity bases and their contents in place, a proposal the German and other governments objected to, echoing Brent Spar twenty-five years later.

Human rights

Shell's operations in Nigeria are the principal subject and are described above. Several general points apply across the company's footprint.

The company has published a human rights commitment since 1997, was among the first to adopt the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and reports against them, and requires security arrangements to comply with the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, which govern the use of public and private security forces at extractive sites.

The recurring difficulty is that the company operates in places where the state's conduct is outside its control and where its presence generates revenue for that state. The Ogoni case established the general shape of the problem: a company requiring protection, a government providing it by means the company would not choose, and the question of what responsibility follows from having asked.

Litigation testing that question has proceeded in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, and the trend of the decisions, including Okpabi v Shell in the British Supreme Court in 2021, has been to allow claims against parent companies for the conduct of foreign subsidiaries where the parent exercised sufficient control, which is a substantial change in the law and which affects every multinational.

Community relations in the Niger Delta involve a system of cash payments, contracts and development projects that critics describe as having entrenched patronage and conflict, and which the company describes as the only practicable means of operating.

Indigenous rights arise in Canada, where Shell's oil sands and gas operations require consultation with First Nations, and the company sold most of its oil sands position to Canadian Natural Resources in 2017.

Shell in culture

Shell's cultural presence has been substantial and is now contested.

The Shell Guides to the English counties, commissioned from 1934 under the editorship of John Betjeman and later John Piper, were an unusual piece of corporate patronage: illustrated guides of genuine literary and artistic quality, produced to encourage motoring, and now collected. The Shell poster campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s, commissioning artists including Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash and Edward McKnight Kauffer, are held in major collections.

The Shell Film Unit, founded in 1934, produced documentaries including The Rival World and worked with directors associated with the British documentary movement.

Sponsorship of the National Gallery, the Science Museum and the Southbank Centre in London, and of the National Theatre, ended or was not renewed through the 2010s and 2020s following campaigns by artists and climate groups, part of a general withdrawal of fossil fuel money from British cultural institutions that also affected BP.

The Shell Eco-marathon, running since 1985, has students design vehicles for maximum fuel efficiency and has produced vehicles achieving thousands of kilometres per litre, and the company's Formula One partnership with Ferrari has been among the longest technical relationships in the sport.

Assessment of the record

Three judgements can reasonably be made about Shell after 119 years.

The first is that it is an exceptional operator of complex physical systems. Perdido, Pearl, Prelude, the Brent decommissioning and the liquefied natural gas fleet are engineering achievements of a high order conducted in conditions that do not forgive error, and the company's technical reputation within its industry is at the top of it.

The second is that its judgement about markets has been better than its judgement about societies. The BG acquisition, the concentration on gas, the trading business and the retreat from refining were each contrarian and each correct. Brent Spar, Ogoniland, the reserves overstatement and the Groningen earthquakes were each failures to anticipate how people outside the company would react to what it was doing, and each cost far more than the underlying decision would have suggested.

The third is that it has known about climate change for longer than almost any institution and has acted on that knowledge slowly and inconsistently. The 1988 report and the 1991 film are documents its critics quote and its executives do not dispute. The company's subsequent participation in lobbying against regulation, its serial adjustment of targets, and the gap between its advertising and its capital allocation are the substance of the case against it, and the Dutch appeal court's 2024 judgment, which affirmed a duty and declined to quantify it, is a reasonable summary of where the argument now rests.

Controversies

Beyond Nigeria, the Arctic and climate, several matters recur.

The OPL 245 case. Shell and Eni paid approximately US$1.3 billion in 2011 for a Nigerian offshore block, with most of the money passing to a company controlled by a former petroleum minister, Dan Etete, who had awarded the block to himself while in office. Prosecutions followed in Italy, where both companies and several executives were acquitted in 2021, with the acquittals upheld on appeal, and proceedings elsewhere were discontinued. The case remains among the most-examined corruption matters in the industry.

The reserves overstatement of 2004 is described above.

Greenwashing. Advertising authorities in several countries have ruled against Shell's environmental claims. The Dutch authority found in 2021 that its carbon offset advertising was misleading; the British Advertising Standards Authority banned advertisements in 2023 for giving a misleading impression of the proportion of the company's business in lower-carbon energy; and similar findings have been made in other jurisdictions.

Tax. Shell's structure and its use of favourable jurisdictions have been examined repeatedly. The company paid no British corporation tax on its North Sea production for several years before 2023, because of decommissioning relief and investment allowances, which was lawful and politically contentious, and paid substantial sums after the energy profits levy was introduced.

Safety. The industry's worst incidents have generally involved other companies, and Shell's record includes the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster in which it was not the operator, the 2004 Nigerian pipeline explosions, and periodic refinery fires. Its process safety reporting is among the more detailed in the industry.

Russia. The purchase of a discounted Russian crude cargo on 4 March 2022, days after the invasion of Ukraine, drew criticism including from the Ukrainian foreign minister, and Shell apologised, committed the profits to Ukrainian humanitarian relief and announced a phased withdrawal.

Assessment

Shell's history is the history of the oil industry outside the United States, and its present difficulty is the industry's.

The company was built on two ideas that were correct and unglamorous: that oil should be shipped in bulk rather than in cases, and that a European combination could resist Standard Oil where neither partner could alone. It grew for a century by finding hydrocarbons in difficult places and by building the infrastructure to move them, and it is exceptionally good at both.

Its distinctive strength now is gas and trading rather than oil. The BG acquisition in 2016, made when the price was falling and widely questioned, gave it the largest liquefied natural gas position of any international company at the moment when gas became the commodity that mattered most, and the trading business converts that position into earnings in a way competitors cannot match. The ARC Resources purchase in 2026 extends it.

Its difficulty is that it has committed to a transition it does not want to fund at the pace its commitments imply. The reduction of targets in March 2024, the withdrawal from offshore wind and retail power, and the concentration on returns are a coherent strategy for maximising value from hydrocarbons and are not a strategy for becoming an energy company of a different kind. Shell has said as much, more candidly than some competitors, and its shareholders have generally approved.

Whether that is the right judgement depends on a prediction about how fast the world reduces its use of the product, and Shell's own scenario planning tradition, the discipline it invented, would say that a company should be prepared for several answers rather than committed to one.