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In this aerial view, cars line up to refuel before prices go up at a Shell petrol station in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province in China, June 14, 2022.
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British energy giant Shell is increasing its oil and gas production to reap profits in the near term. It is also building electric vehicle charging stations across Asia.
Shell CEO Wael Sawan doesn’t know where oil and gas demand will be in 10 to 15 years, he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “Honestly, anyone who knows this is going to be making a lot of money right now. The truth is, we don’t know,” Sawan told CNBC.
But in the short and medium term, Shell sees demand as “very strong” for oil and gas, Sawan told CNBC. “We have been very clear, we will be committed to our oil and gas business for a long time to come,” Sawan added.
also, Shell will invest between 10 to 15 billion dollars between 2023 and 2025 on low-carbon energy technologies, including biofuels, hydrogen, electric vehicle charging, and carbon capture. Shell made more than $42 billion in profits in 2022.
Sawan said one area that Shell is “very lean” in is building charging stations for electric cars, especially in Asia.
“Today we have 46,000 retail locations around the world,” Sawan said. “There’s a lot of side-by-side because then you can put the chargers in the same locations where you sell your internal combustion engines.”
In China, specifically, there is a “huge breakthrough” for electric cars, Sawan told CNBC.
“In fact, in China, we see customers coming in for electric vehicle charging twice as often as customers for internal combustion engines.”
In fact, electric vehicle sales in China reached 3.3 million in 2021, which is three times the number of electric vehicles sold in 2020, according to Data from the International Energy Agency. Europe is the second largest market for electric vehicles, according to the International Energy Agency.
Demand for public charging infrastructure is particularly high in China due to the country’s growing preference for electric vehicles. In addition, many residents of China, and other Asian countries as well, who buy electric vehicles live in high-rise buildings, not homes where it is possible to have a personal charging setup, Sawan said.
Shell’s second area of low-carbon investment is biofuels, which are made from organic materials and waste and then mixed with gasoline. The demand for biofuels is driven Regulatory pressures in multiple parts of the worldSawan told CNBC.
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