Thursday, October 28, 2021
After a court ruling on CO2
Shell significantly improves its climate targets
The oil company Shell has slipped into the red due to the turbulence on the commodity markets. At the same time, he has to face new challenges: a court condemns him to an improved environmental balance – he now wants to work on that.
The British-Dutch oil company Royal Dutch Shell is setting itself new climate targets. By 2030, Shell wants to halve the absolute emissions from its business activities compared to the 2016 level, as the company announced. Shell had declared that it wanted to become climate neutral by 2050. However, the company is under pressure to do more faster after a Dutch court ordered it to set stricter CO2 targets in May.
It aims to reduce all of its emissions, including those from customers burning its products, by 45 percent by 2030. Shell had originally planned to reduce emissions by at least six percent by 2023, by 20 percent by 2030 and by 45 percent by 2035 compared to 2016.
In addition, Shell surprisingly slipped into the red due to the turbulence on the raw material markets. The bottom line was a loss of 447 million dollars (385 million euros) in the months of July to September, as the company announced. This was due to a $ 5.2 billion write-down on the valuation of commodity futures contracts that the company had entered into to hedge against fluctuations in the markets.
In addition, the aftermath of hurricane “Ida”, which led to production failures, weighed on the past quarter. The profit adjusted for one-off effects therefore fell by around a quarter to 4.1 billion dollars in a quarterly comparison, despite higher oil prices. This comes as a surprise to analysts – they had expected a profit at the level of the second quarter. As in the second quarter, sales were just under $ 62 billion. Since the previous year’s figure was heavily burdened by the consequences of the Corona crisis and the drop in oil prices, the quarterly comparison is more meaningful. The market has since recovered and oil costs more than it has been in years.