Shell Plc has walked back its once-ambitious plans to develop millions of carbon offsets projects around the world.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/BloombergEurope's Biggest Oil Company Quietly Shelves a Radical Plan to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint
A faltering offsets program points to new problems with the corporate world’s favorite “climate solution.”
Six months after becoming the chief executive at Shell Plc, Wael Sawan quietly ended the world’s biggest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets, the environmental projects designed to counteract the warming effects of CO2 emissions.
In an all-day investor event in June, Sawan laid out an updated strategy for the European oil major that included cutting costs and doubling down on profit drivers like oil and gas. As important was what he omitted: any mention of the company’s prior commitment to spend up to $100 million a year to build a pipeline of carbon credits, part of the firm’s promise to zero out its emissions by 2050.