Shell Oil Company

Shell Oil Company CAPTION
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Additional Reading

"Yes, we finally unloaded that piece of crap in Denmark we've been trying to sell for decades," Shell Oil Company's  Steve Lesher  [External Relations Manager, U.S. Chemicals and Manufacturing, Shell Oil Company, Walnut Creek, California  |  no Wikipedia entry (Steve Lesher), 2022-09-19] told California lobbyist Gavin McHugh last spring (2022?). "I wouldn't put that in this GHG-sensitivity category. That was just a crappy facility."

This exchange appears in a trove of emails and other materials recently made public by a United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform investigation into oil industry greenwashing. And the "piece of crap in Denmark" Steve Lesher refers to was probably a refinery in Fredericia owned by Shell Oil Company's Danish subsidiary  [Shell plc, formerly Royal Dutch Shell plc] - which was sold to Postlane Partners, a Connecticut-based private equity firm, in early 2021.

"GHG" stands for greenhouse gas, and Steve Lesher's email indicates he didn't think selling the refinery would make the company more climate-friendly. But the Shell Oil Company's press release on the matter had a decidedly greener spin: "This exit supports our ambition to be a net-zero emissions  [carbon neutrality] energy business by 2050 or sooner, in step with society."

Steve Lesher's email offers a window into one way multinational oil companies are trying to present themselves as engines of emissions reduction. Under pressure to cut greenhouse gases in line with "net-zero" targets and maintain their social license to operate - something Shell Oil Company executives fret openly about in private emails - these companies have come up with a neat trick for making themselves look more climate-friendly: selling their worst-offending properties off to someone else.


Steve Lesher's email, sent in 2022-05, also mentioned another sale: Shell Oil Company's Deer Park refinery in Houston, Texas. That sale, Steve Lesher wrote, is "further evidence that Shell Oil Company is divesting of most of the really energy intensive emitters." As evidence, he named five other assets Shell Oil Company purged from its books in the two years earlier. Particularly climate-friendly was Shell's prior unloading of its Canadian oil sands  [Athabasca oil sands] business, "a big greenhouse gas headache with a lot of non-governmental organization (NGO) opposition."

"No one in the company has said this," he continued, "but the pattern is pretty clear: if you're a major greenhouse gas emitter, and particularly if you operate in a GHG-sensitive area like [California, Washington] or [Canada], your days in the Shell Oil Company family are probably numbered."

What happens to those facilities, though? Those emissions don't just disappear. Often, they change hands to far less accountable and high-profile companies, usually private equity firms or smaller, privately held drillers, which are content to keep on spewing carbon, methane, and other pollutants into the atmosphere and surrounding communities. In some cases, Shell Oil Company is perfectly content to keep polluting. "The other pattern to notice," Steve Lesher wrote, "is where we DO own high GHG intensive things, it's in areas where they aren't that politically sensitive about such matters: China, Singapore, Malaysia, Louisiana." In other words, the places where they can get away with it.

[ ... snip ... ]

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