Shell to invest up to $15 billion in renewables by 2026

Shell will invest between 10 and 15 billion dollars into low-carbon energy solutions by 2026, the company announced on Tuesday, calling itself a “significant investor in the energy transition.” Shell’s profits exceeded 78 billion dollars over the last five years. The company also recorded its first ever profit on renewable energies last year.

According to Shell, it is well on its way to halving emissions from its operations by 2030, compared to 2016. “By the end of 2023, Shell had achieved more than 60% of this target.” The company said it is still on target to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Shell also announced a “new ambition” to reduce customer emissions from the use of its oil products by 15 to 20 percent by 2030, compared to 2021.

The company said that its climate goals have shifted its focus to prioritizing value over volume in power. Shell will, therefore, focus more on “select markets and segments,” selling more power to commercial customers and less to retail customers.

Shell is focused on growing its production of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which it calls a “critical fuel” in the energy transition. “We are cutting emissions from oil and gas production while keeping oil production stable and growing sales of low-carbon energy solutions while gradually reducing sales of oil products such as petrol, diesel and jet fuel,” the company said.

The company said it invested 5.6 billion euros into low-carbon solutions last year, including electric vehicle charging, biofuels, renewable power, hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage. Its future investments will follow similar trends, aiming to scale up new technologies to make them more affordable.

Despite a 2020 loss of 22.53 billion dollars during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, Shell earned a profit of 78.04 billion dollars since the start of 2019. Overall profit at the company fell by more than 54 percent to 19.64 billion dollars in 2023, from a record high of 42.87 billion dollars in 2022. Revenue last year totaled 316.62 billion dollars, down 17 percent from 2022.

That said, Shell’s renewables and energy solutions segment posted its first-ever profit, with earnings of under 3.04 billion dollars. A year earlier, the group lost 1.06 billion dollars after dropping 1.51 billion dollars in 2021.

Earnings from natural gas plunged from 22.21 billion dollars in 2022 down to 7.05 billion in 2023. There was also a sharp reduction in earnings from chemical products, which fell from 4.52 billion dollars down to 1.53 billion dollars.

Earnings per share fell by half to 2.88 dollars, with last year’s dividend pegged at under 1.24 dollars per share. That was up from 99 cents a year earlier.