Shell CEO Wael Sawan on balancing innovation and today's energy needs | BizShift video series

Thank you, good to be here.

One of the largest energy companies in the world. We can connect energy sources to people, to businesses, and we make that happen through some of our production activities, extraction activities, all the way through transporting liquids like oil, diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, gases all the way to our customers who either use it for transportation typically or for industrial use. And we do that across multiple countries, and I've had the privilege to do that for 117 years now.

I fumbled my way into the company. I was studying in France and had planned to go back to the Middle East where I had studied and wanted to develop my career. I studied engineering. I come from the Middle East, I was born in Lebanon and spent most of my formative years in the United Arab Emirates. I was given an opportunity to come in for an interview, so I thought I would test it out more to hone my interviewing skills. One thing led to another, I said I'll do one year after they offered me the job, and 27 years on I feel incredibly privileged to be sitting in this chair.

I started as an engineer, what we call offshore but really was in the desert of Oman on a rotation for a few years, and evolved my career from what was predominantly called a technical operational upstream role into eventually more of a techno-commercial role where I worked on markets like the Libyan market at the time that was starting to open up, the Iraqi market and others. I stepped out to do my MBA for a couple of years with a short internship at Goldman before coming back into Shell, and then my career took a turn into gas and power at the time, and then from there into downstream into mobility, our marketing business. So I got the opportunity to see most of Shell before stepping into leadership roles, which firstly took me into Qatar running the operation there, then to run our global deepwater business, then our upstream global business sitting on the executive committee, and then into our integrated gas and renewables business on the executive committee before taking up this role two years ago.

I've been lucky to do so.

This is a company that has an incredible set of legacy positions, outstanding capability, leading franchise businesses, but that had not been delivering to its full potential. Our job was to be able to turn it around, to deliver to its full potential quickly, and to position it to be the company that it deserves to be for the coming hundred years. We are blessed to have had decades of great businesses, and I didn't sense we were as hungry as we needed to be to establish the most competitive businesses in isolation. We needed to be the best we could be, and as a whole we needed to be even better than that to essentially create a total that is greater than the sum of the parts. And we had pockets where we were doing that, but it wasn't as widespread across the organization as I believe this company can be. There is a big delta there which we are just going after at the moment.

Try to do three things. Number one, grow our LNG business to be the world-leading business that it can be. Number two, sustain our liquids production at lower and lower carbon. Number three, transform our customer-facing businesses towards lower carbon solutions. That's at the heart of what we're trying to do as a company, and in each of those we are playing what I believe is a leadership role in the energy transition, and put together I think it positions us as the investment case for the energy transition.

Gas and particularly LNG is going to be a foundational fuel for the future. It'll play a role to decarbonize or to displace coal, and it's going to be a critical fuel to be able to provide the balancing for the intermittency that the renewables space will bring. It's important to also recognize gas is not just for power. One of the biggest opportunities for gas is in the industrial space, fertilizers, cement, aluminum, and the like. But where we particularly play an important role is in LNG, so in essence taking gas from those who have too much of it to those who need it, sometimes because their demand is growing, sometimes because even though their demand is flat, their own domestic gas production on which that demand was built is declining. Take Southeast Asia as a good example. So rather than having to fundamentally turn over their entire capital stock for their economy, by importing LNG they are able to use that as an energy source.

Great question. I think firstly to recognize of all the fossil fuels, gas is the cleanest. Simply by shifting from coal to gas-fired power, you're reducing emissions by 50% today, and you're doing it in an affordable and economic way over the life cycle of that investment. And importantly, when you build infrastructure for LNG, there is a pathway to take it to net zero. That pathway is the LNG, the carbon molecules you have today. Over time we will decarbonize that. What do I mean by that? In Canada, for example, our project there we're using hydropower for parts of our demand, or in Qatar we're using carbon capture and sequestration. And in the late 2030s, 2040s, there's a pathway to defossilize that using what's known as liquid synthetic gas, essentially taking power, green energy, combined with CO2. So today it's already contributing to a significant reduction in emissions, and over time it can take us to zero emissions.