In a letter dated November 28, 2017 to the Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, Patricia Espinosa, Royal Dutch Shell’s Chief Executive Officer Ben van Beurden  announced its intention to halve its carbon footprint by 2050 and to increase its spending on clean energy to up to USD 2 billion a year in order to help meet the goals of the Paris Climate Change Agreement:

“Shell is announcing an ambition to bring down the net footprint of our energy products (expressed in grams of CO2 equivalent per Megajoule consumed) by around half by 2050. As an interim goal, we aim to reduce it by around 20% by 2035- an ambition that we believe is compatible with a 2° C roadmap. This ambition includes emissions direct from Shell operations, emissions caused by third parties who supply energy for that production and emissions caused by the use of our products by consumers, as well as activities that reduce or offset C02 emissions.”

Shell indicated to shareholders that it would increase capital allocated to clean technologies will increase  to USD 1 to 2 billion a year through 2020, and that the company would measure progress on cutting its net carbon footprint by annually disclosing information not only from its operations and energy use, but from the use of its energy products.

In his letter to the UN’s Patricia Espinosa, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden wrote that meeting the goal of halving its carbon footprint by 2050 would involve providing lower-carbon fuels like biofuels and hydrogen to customers, in addition to generating renewable power from solar and wind; driving demand for battery electric vehicles by growing the number of charging points and developing gas markets for power and transport.

Photo: Shell’s latest hydrogen station that opened in Torrance California last October.