Royal Dutch Shell plc chief executive officer Ben van Beurden was at the Web Summit conference in Portugal recently.
Why do you not break Shell apart and say we have a hydrocarbon business, and we have a clean business?
That was the question posed to Royal Dutch Shell plc chief executive officer Ben van Beurden during an on-stage interview at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, which was attended by Rigzone.
“The energy transition is just that, it’s a transition, so you have to go from one to the other. You’re going to be in an uncomfortable place, where you are going from one to the other,” van Beurden said, responding to the question.
“We need the legacy business funds [for] this business of the future. If I need to build my hydrogen business just with the income from my current hydrogen business, it’s going to take me a century,” he added.
“We have to be able to fund that transition to the business of the future and if you think about the innovations that we are going to need to build this electrical, hydrogen, bio system for the world with carbon capture and storage nature solutions etc., it needs the interdependency of the component parts that currently make up Shell. To break it all apart, we’re not going to be able to make some huge transitions,” van Beurden went on to say.
