Shell plc

• 1. Introduction

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  Shell plc once redesigned a three-billion-dollar natural gas platform in the North Sea, raising its height by one to two meters. That was in 1989, and the reason was an expected rise in sea level caused by global warming. Today Shell is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London. It operates in over 99 countries, produces around 3.7 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, and has around 44,000 service stations worldwide. By revenue, it is the second largest investor-owned oil and gas company in the world, behind only ExxonMobil. Its primary listing is on the London Stock Exchange, with secondary listings in Amsterdam and New York. Yet the name on those stations has an unlikely origin. This documentary asks how that name grew into a global giant, and why it needed a Dutch partner to get there. It also asks what happens when a company of this size meets protesters, courts and a changing climate.

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• 2. Seashells and Tankers

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  In 1833, a family business in Houndsditch, London, began importing and selling seashells to collectors. Marcus Samuel Sr. founded that import trade, and it gave the later company called "Shell" its name.

  In 1892, his son, the younger Samuel, was collecting seashell specimens around the Caspian Sea. He saw potential in exporting lamp oil from the region. He then commissioned the world's first purpose-built oil tanker, the Murex, whose name is Latin for a type of snail shell. By 1907 the company had a whole fleet.

  There is a tempting alternative explanation for the name. For several decades the company ran a refinery at Shell Haven on the River Thames. Yet there is no evidence that the refinery supplied the name.

  The Shell logo is known as the pecten, after the sea shell Pecten maximus, the giant scallop. Its yellow and red colours are thought to relate to the flag of Spain, because Shell built early service stations in California, a former Spanish colony. Raymond Loewy designed the current revision of the logo in 1971.

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• 3. A Dutch Partnership

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  In 1890, a Dutch company was founded to develop an oilfield at Pangkalan Brandan in North Sumatra. Royal Dutch Petroleum Company was initially led by August Kessler, Hugo Loudon and Henri Deterding. A British counterpart followed in 1897. The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company, with the quotation marks part of its legal name, was founded by Marcus Samuel, later the 1st Viscount Bearsted, and his brother Samuel Samuel.

  In April 1907, the two rivals were joined as the Royal Dutch Shell Group. The merger was arranged by Calouste Gulbenkian, a British-Armenian oil magnate, who emerged as a major shareholder. The push came largely from the need to compete globally with the American firm Standard Oil.

  Patriotic sensibilities in both countries would not permit a full-scale merger or takeover. So each company kept its legal existence and the two operated as a single-unit partnership. Royal Dutch received 60 percent of the stock and Shell received 40 percent. Both became holding companies for two operating firms. Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij held production and refining assets, while Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company held transport and storage. The Hague directed production and manufacture, and London directed transport and storage.

  In 1912, the group bought the Rothschilds' Russian oil assets in a stock deal. Its production then came 53 percent from the East Indies, 29 percent from the Russian Empire and 17 percent from Romania. By 1920, Shell was the largest producer of oil in the world.

  By the end of the 1920s, the group produced 11 percent of the world's crude oil and owned 10 percent of its tanker tonnage. It first entered the chemicals industry in 1929 with the founding of Shell Chemicals. Later it became one of the "Seven Sisters" that dominated global petroleum from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s.

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• 4. Wars and Borders

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  During the First World War, Shell was the main supplier of fuel to the British Expeditionary Force. It was the sole supplier of aviation fuel and provided 80 percent of the British Army's TNT. It also volunteered all of its shipping to the British Admiralty. The German invasion of Romania in 1916 destroyed 17 percent of the group's worldwide production.

  In 1919, Shell took control of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company. In 1922, at the Genoa Conference, it negotiated for a monopoly over Soviet oilfields in Baku and Grosny. A leaked draft treaty led the talks to break down. During the Spanish Civil War, the company sold oil to the Nationalist side of Francisco Franco. In the 1930s, the Mexican government seized Shell's Mexican assets.

  After Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, the head office of the Dutch companies moved to Curaçao. In 1945, Shell's Danish headquarters in Copenhagen was being used by the Gestapo. Royal Air Force De Havilland Mosquitoes bombed it in Operation Carthage. Royal Dutch ranked 79th among United States corporations in the value of Second World War military production contracts.

  In Italy, the Shell business had begun on the 13th of July 1912 as a company called Nafta, based in La Spezia. On the 8th of August 1940, after Italy entered the war, Nafta was seized and placed under the management of Agip. In 1949, the restored company was renamed Shell Italiana.

  Oil concessions could also start local wars. In 1937, the Iraq Petroleum Company, 23.75 percent owned by Royal Dutch Shell, signed an oil concession agreement with the Sultan of Muscat. In 1952, the company offered financial support to raise an armed force to help the Sultan occupy the interior of Oman, where geologists expected oil. This led to the 1954 outbreak of the Jebel Akhdar War, which lasted more than five years.

  In Sri Lanka, Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike's government nationalized the assets of Shell, Esso and Caltex in 1962. Shell returned in 1996 by buying a 51 percent stake in the Colombo Gas Company for 37 million dollars. On the 26th of February 2025, it opened its first Shell-branded fuel station in the country in over six decades, at Ambathale in Colombo District.

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• 5. Boardrooms and Balance Sheets

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  In 2004, Shell admitted that it had overstated its oil reserves. Confidence in the group fell. The Financial Services Authority fined the company 17 million pounds, and chairman Philip Watts departed. A lawsuit led to a payment of 450 million dollars to non-American shareholders in 2007.

  The scandal pushed the company to simplify its structure. In November 2004, Shell announced a single capital structure under a new parent called Royal Dutch Shell plc. That parent had been incorporated in 2002 as Forthdeal Limited, a shelf corporation set up by two Bristol firms, Swift Incorporations Limited and Instant Companies Limited. Its headquarters and tax residency were to be in The Hague, with a registered office in London.

  The unification was completed on the 20th of July 2005. Royal Dutch Petroleum Company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange on the 18th of November 2005. The new shares were issued on a 60/40 basis, matching the original ownership. The nearly century-old partnership was dissolved, and the slash was removed from the name Royal Dutch/Shell.

  On the 4th of August 2005, the board announced that Jorma Ollila, then chairman and CEO of Nokia, would succeed Aad Jacobs as non-executive chairman. Ollila was the first Shell chairman who was neither Dutch nor British. Peter Voser became CEO on the 1st of July 2009, and Ben van Beurden took over on the 3rd of January 2014.

  On the 30th of April 2020, Shell cut its dividend for the first time since the Second World War, after oil prices collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic. In September 2020, it said it would cut up to 9,000 jobs. It announced a loss of 21.7 billion dollars for 2020.

  In November 2021, Shell announced it would move its headquarters to London, abandon its dual share structure and become Shell plc. The name change was registered on the 21st of January 2022. In January 2023, Wael Sawan succeeded van Beurden as CEO.

  The year 2022 was Shell's best ever, with double the profits of 2021 and the highest profit in its history. Revenue tells a different story. Shell generated 284 billion dollars in 2024, down from 451 billion dollars in 2013.

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• 6. The Arctic Gamble

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  In 2006, Shell began a 4.5-billion-dollar Arctic drilling program, after buying an offshore lease in 2005. It bought the Kulluk oil rig and leased the Noble Discoverer drillship. The project was first led by Pete Slaiby, an executive who had worked in the North Sea. After a second lease in 2008, drilling did not start until 2012. Rig refurbishment, permit delays and lawsuits stood in the way.

  Trouble continued once drilling began. Shell faced issues with air permits, Coast Guard certification of a marine vessel, and severe damage to essential oil-spill equipment. Then came the Kulluk. A winter storm on the 27th of December 2012 caused the towing crews and the rescue service to lose control of the rig while it was being towed to Washington state. By the 1st of January 2013, the Kulluk had run aground off Sitkalidak Island, near the eastern end of Kodiak Island.

  Larry McKinney of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M explained to Fortune magazine why delay mattered. He said: "A two-month delay in the Arctic is not a two-month delay... A two-month delay could wipe out the entire drilling season." By then, Shell had invested nearly 5 billion dollars. In February 2013, it said it would "pause" the project.

  Protest had followed the plans from early on. On the 16th of March 2012-52 Greenpeace activists from five countries boarded the icebreakers Fennica and Nordica, which were chartered to support Shell's rigs near Alaska. In July 2012, Greenpeace activists shut down 53 Shell petrol stations in Edinburgh and London. Edward Itta, an Inupiat leader and former mayor of the North Slope Borough, was conflicted. He feared a spill could destroy Inupiat hunting-and-fishing culture, yet his borough relied on tax revenue from oil and gas production.

  Executive vice president Ann Pickard described the 2012 failures as a lesson. In a June 2014 interview, she said the forensic review showed "there was an on/off switch". She called the Arctic a long-term "marathon". The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management report in 2015 put the chance of a major spill in deep-sea Arctic drilling at 75 percent before the century's end.

  In May 2015, protesters paddled kayaks in Elliott Bay in Seattle to greet the arrival of the drilling rig Polar Pioneer. During a Coast Guard inspection, a piece of anti-pollution gear failed. Shell announced an extension of the suspension of its Arctic drilling program in September 2015.

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• 7. Spills and Courtrooms

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  In the 1990s, protesters criticised the company over its plan to dispose of the Brent Spar platform in the North Sea. Despite support from the UK government, Shell reversed the decision under public pressure. It maintained that sinking the platform would have been environmentally better. Later, the European Commission and five European Union members criticised Shell for leaving part of its decommissioned rigs standing. Germany said the estimated 11,000 tonnes of raw oil and toxins left inside would eventually seep into the sea, and called it a "ticking timebomb".

  On the 15th of January 1999, off the Argentinian town of Magdalena, Buenos Aires, the Shell tanker Estrella pampeana collided with a German cargo ship. The spill polluted the environment, drinkable water, plants and animals. Shell denied responsibility, but an Argentine court ruled in 2002 that the corporation was responsible. More than a decade later, a referendum in Magdalena accepted a compensatory payout of 9.5 million dollars.

  Shell began production in Nigeria in 1958, and it still extracts crude oil in the Niger Delta. Heavy contamination of the air, ground and water there is often cited as an example of ecocide. Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth the Netherlands have protested against Shell. In January 2013, a Dutch court rejected four of five allegations over Niger Delta oil pollution. It found a subsidiary guilty of one case and ordered compensation for a Nigerian farmer.

  On the 29th of January 2021, the Hague Court of Appeals ruled that Shell's Nigerian unit was liable for damages from pipeline leaks in the villages of Oruma and Goi. Shell said it should not be liable, because the spills were the result of sabotage.

  In the United States, a pipeline crack caused about 21,000 gallons of oil to spill near Tracy, California, in May 2016. That same month, Shell was responsible for an 88,200-gallon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Two ruptures in a Shell pipeline in Altamont, California, in September 2015 and May 2016 raised questions about the oversight of the Office of the State Fire Marshal.

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• 8. Climate Under Scrutiny

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  Shell was the ninth-largest corporate producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the period 1988-2015. That ranking counts both its own emissions and those from all the fossil fuels it sells. The burning of its products accounts for 1.67 percent of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions over those years. In 2017, a public information film called "Climate of Concern" resurfaced. Critics said it showed that Shell had a clear grasp of global warming 26 years earlier.

  On the 5th of April 2019, the Dutch group Milieudefensie, together with six NGOs and more than 17,000 citizens, sued Shell. They accused it of harming the climate despite knowing about global warming since 1986. In May 2021, the district court of The Hague ruled that Shell must cut carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030 compared with 2019 levels. Shell contested the ruling, arguing that it exceeded judicial authority. On the 12th of November 2024, the appeals court dismissed the order.

  In April 2020, Shell announced plans to reach net zero emissions by 2050 or sooner. Critics point to the gap between the pledges and the spending. From 2010 to 2018, only 1 percent of Shell's long-term investments went to low-carbon energy such as wind and solar. Shell also failed to meet its own 2020 target to spend 6 billion dollars on renewable energy. In 2021-30 percent of shareholders voted for a climate resolution filed by the group Follow This. In March 2024, Sawan moderated the near-term targets, dropping the goal of a 45 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2035.

  Shell has made low-carbon bets as well. The Quest project near Fort McMurray, Alberta, began commercial operations in November 2015. It was the world's first commercial-scale carbon capture and storage project for oil sands, expected to cut 1.08 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. In December 2016, Shell won the auction for the 700 MW Borssele III and IV offshore wind farms. In October 2017, it bought NewMotion, Europe's biggest vehicle charging network.

  Critics have also questioned how Shell describes its record. On the 2nd of September 2002, chairman Philip Watts accepted a "Greenwash Lifetime Achievement Award" near the World Summit on Sustainable Development. In 2008, the British Advertising Standards Authority ruled that Shell misled the public by calling a 10-billion-dollar oil sands project in Alberta a "sustainable energy source". In 2021, Netherlands officials told Shell to stop a campaign claiming customers could turn their fuel "carbon neutral" through offsets.

  The latest figures put the scale of the challenge in numbers. Shell reported 58 million metric tons of emissions from its operations in 2024, with 50 million from Scope 1 sources and 8 million from Scope 2 sources.

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