The company wants to "assess the most commercial way forward for the project"
A major investment in green energy is going poorly for Shell $SHEL. The oil company announced Friday that it would be taking up to $2 billion in charges this quarter, partly for its sale of a refinery in Singapore and partly for a biofuels plant in the Netherlands.
Though the Singapore sale has been in the works for a while, the $1 billion biofuels writedown is a new development. Earlier this week, the company said that it was pausing construction on the facility, which had been expected to go online this year and was going to be one of the biggest such plants in Europe.
“Temporarily pausing on-site construction now will allow us to assess the most commercial way forward for the project,” said Huibert Vigeveno, a Shell executive in charge of the division overseeing the project. “We are committed to our target of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, with low-carbon fuels as a key part of Shell’s strategy to help us and our customers profitably decarbonise, and we will continue to use shareholder capital in a measured and disciplined way, delivering more value with less emissions.”
The Financial Times noted that the market for less-pollutive aviation fuel has softened on the continent this year because of cheaper Chinese products, though said fuel is a big reason that German airline Lufthansa and others are expecting airline tickets to start getting more expensive.
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