Shell could afford to allocate far greater sums to investment but is choosing not to do so
BP’s Bernard Looney put it more succinctly last year when he described the company as “a cash machine at these types of prices”, but Shell’s chief executive, Ben van Beurden, was coming from the same place as he reflected on almost £10bn of profits in a single quarter. “Of course these are very significant [profit] margins, but these margins are not our doing. They are the doing of how global markets play out,” he said.
He’s right about market conditions obviously. A barrel of Brent fetched well over $100 during the quarter, gas prices have gone to the moon; refining capacity is severely tight; and the entire industry underinvested during the first year of the pandemic, creating near-perfect conditions for a spike in prices when Russia invaded Ukraine.
