LONDON, July 9 (Reuters) – London-based asset manager Sarasin & Partners has sold nearly 20% of its holdings in Royal Dutch Shell, saying the oil and gas company’s spending plans are out of synch with international targets to battle climate change.

The 33.8 million pounds ($42.1 million) sale represents a fraction of Shell’s $261 billion market value.

But it is a rebuke of Shell’s strategy less than a year after the Anglo-Dutch company, together with a large group of investors including Sarasin known as Climate Action 100+, agreed on a landmark resolution outlining Shell’s ambition to reduce carbon emissions. read more

Shell, like Spain’s Repsol and France’s Total, is making deals along the electricity supply chain — from gas and renewable power generation to electric vehicle charging points, echoing its existing oil extraction-to-petrol-pump model. Public sentiment towards many oil and gas companies has soured as criticism of them for not taking sufficient responsibility for their role in global warming has intensified. After selling petrol and diesel at the pump, they are now trying to penetrate the market for household energy supply. READ THE FULL FT ARTICLE read more

Energy giant Shell is to urge the prime minister to make the electric car-charging network more accessible.

Industry bosses are set to meet Theresa May on Wednesday to explore ways to boost the uptake of electric cars. Sinead Lynch, Shell’s chairwoman in the UK, said one of the problems was the array of subscription cards or mobile phone applications still needed to access different charging points.

She said: “There needs to be truly open access so that people can just charge seamlessly wherever they go. They [ministers] have started to address it, but haven’t gone to where Europe is.” read more

As Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers revealed last year, Shell has known about the climate crisis for nearly four decades and its own considerable role in causing it.

THE FIRST THREE SLIDES of climate scientist Peter Kalmus’s plenary speech to Shell’s Powering Progress Together conference were intended to gauge audience reactions. First, he would have asked attendees if they are “concerned about climate breakdown.” Then, to raise their hands if they are “EXTREMELY CONCERNED” about it. In the third slide, Kalmus would have asked panel-goers to raise their hands if they agreed with a simple statement: “Fossil fuel causes harm.”

He never got the chance. Last Wednesday, the day before he was scheduled to appear, Kalmus was disinvited from what the oil giant billed as “an action-oriented day of dialogue focused on accelerating the energy transition.” For those curious about what spooked them, The Intercept is publishing Kalmus’s contraband slideshow. read more

Eneco Group operates more than 2,000 MW of renewable energy and serves over two million customers in The Netherlands, Belgium and the UK.

According to insiders, Dutch-British Shell, in collaboration with Dutch pension investor PGGM (healthcare and welfare sector), offers a great opportunity to win the takeover battle. With its New Energies division, Shell has set aside billions to invest in green energy.

Printed below is an English translation of an article published today by the Dutch FT, Financieele Dagblad.

Shell, Mitsubishi, Macquarie and KKR continue in Eneco auction

Gijs den Brinker

Four parties are in the battle for energy company Eneco. This is a consortium of oil and gas company Shell and pension investor PGGM, the Japanese company Mitsubishi, the Australian infrastructure investor Macquarie and the American investor KKR.

Multiple sources say that to the FD. KKR is a surprising name in the playing field. Never before was it known that the American investment company was making a shot at the energy company that advertised itself as green.

Eneco is currently owned by 44 municipalities, including Rotterdam and The Hague, but is for sale. Candidate buyers were able to express their interest until the end of May. The sale goes through a so-called controlled auction. At the end of last week, the company, together with representatives of the shareholders, decided which parties could continue to the next round. read more

George Monbiot: Wed 26 Jun 2019

Don’t buy the greenwash. Shell’s initiatives, which have won over many conservation groups, are dwarfed by its investment in oil and gas

It is hard to believe it needs stating, but it does. The oil industry is not your friend. Whatever it might say about its ethical credentials, while it continues to invest in fossil fuels, it accelerates climate breakdown and the death of the habitable planet. You would think this point was obvious to everyone. But over the past few weeks, I have spoken to dozens of environmentalists who appear to believe that Shell is on their side. read more

Royal Dutch Shell chief executive Ben van Beurden speaks at a full year results conference in London on January 31, 2019. – Royal Dutch Shell today said that net profit surged 80 percent to $23.4 billion in 2018, thanks to higher oil prices and cost: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Fifteen years later, peak oil is still talked about by some, but most industry insiders pay it no heed. Instead, over the last few years, the increasingly popular concept has been peak demand. Peak demand is the idea that the demand for oil will reach an apex and then start to decrease, especially as government regulations require more use of alternative energies and as battery-powered machines, like electric vehicles, will presumably become more popular.

Peak demand may or may come to pass—that is not the concern here. What we do know is that if the peak demand idea continues to gain popularity it will lead to a shortage of oil in the coming years and decades. The idea of peak demand threatens the global oil supply because it incentivizes and even excuses oil companies to stop exploring for and producing (E&P) more oil. read more

The market greeted the oil major’s latest update with a sceptical shrug 

Shell CEO Ben van Beurden’s attempt to power up the company’s share price with a much-ballyhooed strategic update didn’t do much to energise the markets.

The oil giant held out the prospect of a gusher of money for investors between 2021 and 2025, promising to return $125bn (£99bn) in dividends and share buybacks, more than double the number of a decade earlier. It also increased its capital investment estimate a bit, to an average of $30bn in the five years to 2025.

A neat looking trick the company says it can pull off with oil at $60 a barrel, with cash expected to flow freely from new projects. But the shares still fell in response. read more

David Sheppard, Energy Editor: 23 MAY 2019

The annual general meetings of BP and Royal Dutch Shell this week confirmed Europe’s two largest oil and gas majors are on diverging tracks in the battle against climate change. Both companies now accept the need to overhaul their businesses in a manner that would have been unthinkable even five years ago, as the clamour from investors and activists has become too loud to ignore. But their approaches differ…

FULL FT ARTICLE

The oversupplied gas market provides the logic for the company’s move downstream

NICK BUTLER

Since Maarten Wetselaar, Royal Dutch Shell’s director of gas and new energies, suggested a few weeks ago that Shell could be “by far the biggest power company in the world” by 2035 as it moves into electricity, oil and gas rivals have been asking if they should be doing the same. Existing power suppliers have begun to worry about whether their business models are secure.

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From next week Wednesday, Shell will offer customers in the Netherlands the option to pay one cent extra per liter of fuel. The Dutch oil and gas giant will then use that extra money to compensate for CO2 emissions. “This offers customers in the Netherlands an interim solution as long as electric driving is not yet affordable for everyone”, Marjan van Loon, director of Shell Nederland, said to NOS.

According to Shell, that one extra cent per liter is enough to drive in a “CO2 neutral” way. The voluntary contribution from customers will be invested in CO2 compensation projects, such as planting trees in Peru and Indonesia. The company invests abroad in such projects because the Netherlands does not yet have a certified CO2 compensation system, Shell said. read more

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On Friday, April 5, we will file the summons with which we will sue Shell for causing climate change. Normally you send a bailiff to hand over the package of paper. But we want to go to Shell headquarters with as many co-claimants as possible to hand over the summons in person. With a march and speeches and music and hundreds of people. So come to The Hague, bring your children, friends and family. And put an end to Shell’s climate destruction together with us. 

Extracts from a translated email involving Dutch climate change campaigners.

TRANSLATION STARTS

Come to the Shell headquarters on 5 April!

Date: Fri 29 Mar 2019

Subject: FW: Come to the Shell headquarters on 5 April!

Dear xxxxx

Did you hear it? We sue Shell for causing disastrous climate change. On Friday, April 5, we file the summons at the Shell headquarters in The Hague to officially start the lawsuit. Not only do we send a bailiff to hand over the papers, but we go to Shell headquarters with as many co-claimants as possible to personally hand over the summons. read more

Ed Crooks in New York and Anjli Raval in London: 25 March 2019

On Sunday Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, announced that its First Utility retail power business would be rebranded as Shell Energy, with 700,000 households switched to renewable power. Customers will be offered not only cleaner electricity but discounts on fast-charging for their electric vehicles as well as broadband and smart-home technologies.

FULL FT ARTICLE

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Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Total and BP together have spent more than $1 billion on public relations since the Paris Agreement.

• By Alexander C. Kaufman
• Chris D’Angelo, HuffPost US
• 22 March 2019

The world’s five largest publicly traded oil companies are increasing their investments in oil and gas, putting a combined $110 billion in new fossil-fuel production.

Meanwhile, those firms are projected to spend just $3.6 billion on low-carbon investments, such as biofuels and renewables, according to a new analysis that Influence Map, a British nonprofit that analyzes corporate influence on climate policy, derived from industry data and numbers buried in company disclosures.

The reckless disparity comes just months after the United Nations warned that the world must rapidly phase out fossil fuel use over the next decade or face catastrophic global warming of at least 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. read more