Our role in advancing the energy transition

Our strategy is designed to grow shareholder value while also helping to meet the dual challenge. We believe it is consistent with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement, which calls for the world to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the context of sustainable development and eradicating poverty

A key element of our strategy is our ‘reduce, improve, create’ framework, which focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in our own operations, improving our products to help our customers and consumers lower their emissions, and creating low carbon businesses.

We believe we are uniquely placed to lead in advancing the energy transition:

• We are actively managing our portfolio to remain resilient in a changing world, and believe we have enough flexibility in our portfolio to reshape our business and balance sheet in around 10 years. This enables us to monitor changing trends, consumer preferences and legislation, and provides us with optionality to adjust our portfolio and adapt to the future.
• Our approach to the energy transition is grounded in the experience we’ve gained since we first called for action on the threat of climate change more than 20 years ago.
• We have the skills and expertise, and are already in action to meet our low carbon ambitions.

A shared challenge

To meet the Paris goals, we believe the world must take strong action on a range of fronts:

• Reducing emissions rather than promoting one energy source as the answer.
• Improving energy efficiency.
• Using and deploying new technologies, such as carbon capture, use and storage.
• Putting a price on carbon to help drive action in an efficient and cost-effective way.

In 2019 we are supporting a resolution from a group of institutional investors to describe in our corporate reporting how our strategy is consistent with the Paris goals. Subject to shareholder approval for the resolution at our annual general meeting we will provide more information on this in future reports.