In this aerial view, cars line up for fuel before prices go up at a Shell gas station in Wuhan, capital of China’s Hubei province, June 14, 2022.
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British energy giant Shell is ramping up its oil and gas production in a bid to turn a profit in the short term. It is also building electric vehicle charging stations across Asia.
Shell Chief Executive Wael Sawan told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that he doesn’t know where oil and gas demand will be in the next 10 to 15 years. “Honestly, anyone who knows that is making a lot of money at the moment. The reality is, we don’t know,” Sawan told CNBC.
But in the short and medium term, Shell sees demand for oil and gas as “very strong,” Sawan told CNBC. “We have made it very clear that we will be committed to our oil and gas business for a long time to come,” Sawan added.
return, Shell to invest $10 billion to $15 billion Low-carbon energy technologies between 2023 and 2025, including biofuels, hydrogen, electric vehicle charging and carbon capture.Shell makes more than $42 billion in profits 2022.
One area Shell is “going further into heavily” is building charging stations for electric vehicles, particularly in Asia, Sawan said.
“We have 46,000 retail locations worldwide today,” Sawan said. “There’s a lot of adjacency because you can put the charger where you sell the combustion engine.”
Specifically, in China, EVs have become “significantly popular,” Sawan told CNBC.
“In fact, in China, we’re seeing twice as many EV charging customers as we do internal combustion engine customers.”
In fact, according to the data, the sales of electric vehicles in China will reach 3.3 million in 2021, three times the sales of electric vehicles in 2020 Data from the International Energy Agency. According to the International Energy Agency, Europe is the second largest market for electric vehicles.
Public charging infrastructure is in particular high demand in China due to the country’s growing preference for electric vehicles. In addition, many residents of China and other Asian countries who buy electric vehicles live in high-rise buildings rather than homes where they can install personal charging units, Sawan said.
The second area of Shell’s low-carbon investment is in biofuels, which are made from organic waste and then blended with petrol.The demand for biofuels is driven by Regulatory pressure in several parts of the worldSawan told CNBC.
