He will be replaced by Wael Sawan, until now head of the integrated gas and renewable energy division.
Shell’s chief executive, Dutchman Ben van Beurden, will leave his post at the end of 2022 and will be replaced by Canadian Wael Sawan, the British energy giant announced on Thursday. Mr van Beurden, 64, will remain in a board advisory role until June 2023 and then leave the group, Shell said in a statement.
A graduate of McGill (Canada) and Harvard (USA), Mr. Sawan was until now based in The Hague as Director of Integrated Gas and Renewable Systems. He was previously director of exploration and production activities, and had served on the group’s executive committee for three years. Chairman of the board, Andrew Mackenzie, hailed Mr van Beurden’s “extraordinary 39-year career” at Shell, “which culminated in 9 years as an exceptional chief executive”.
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“For the past decade, (Mr van Beurden) has been at the forefront of the transition to carbon neutrality,” he added. He stressed that the resigning leader “leaves behind him a profitable and solid company with a robust balance sheet, very strong liquidity creation capacities, and promising growth options”. Mr. van Beurden led the group during the pandemic when hydrocarbon prices collapsed.
They have since rebounded spectacularly with the economic recovery post-lockdowns linked to Covid-19, and since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is disrupting global supplies.
Reviews
Shell published at the end of July a net profit of 18 billion dollars for the second quarter, thanks to the surge in oil and gas prices, profits such as they caused controversy in the United Kingdom and in France in particular in full crisis cost of living and soaring energy bills. The action of Shell reacted little Thursday, rising 0.21% to 2,346.00 pence at the opening of the London Stock Exchange.
“It has been a privilege and an honor to serve Shell for almost four decades,” from early days as a liquefied natural gas engineer to the top of the company, van Beurden said in the statement. Shell is regularly criticized for its impact on the environment, and its general meeting in May was notably heckled by environmental activists.
In May, a Shell consultant had resigned with a bang, accusing the British oil giant of “completely failing in (its) ambition to transition to carbon neutrality”. An institutional investor, Royal London Asset Management, also criticized Shell’s climate transition plan, saying it did not reduce the group’s oil consumption enough.
The group has also appealed the decision of a Dutch court which had ordered it to reduce its CO2 emissions in a resounding case launched by a group of NGOs. In December, the shareholders of the hydrocarbon giant had also voted overwhelmingly in favor of the transfer, after a century, of the headquarters of the group from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom and the withdrawal of “Royal Dutch” from the name of the group, born at the beginning of the 20th century from the merger between the British company Shell and the Dutch company Royal Dutch.