Shell Launches "Sleek New Startup" For Clean Energy; In Reality, It's Just An Oil Industry Jobs Bulletin Board

A sleek new startup promising to ‘advance the energy transition’ launched earlier this month promising to “[connect] thousands of innovators across the globe to tackle difficult energy and climate challenges”.

The venture, Onward, is owned by Shell, a company that brought in $28bn in profits from oil and gas last year. The company’s website says it is “accelerating pathways to energy innovation”, serving as a “hub for innovation, collaboration and entrepreneurialism”, and creating a “compelling, evidence-based picture of the benefits of a net-zero future”. Team bios include descriptions of an ideal day “in our clean energy future”: kitesurfing, snorkeling and hiking.

However, despite an abundance of green imagery and language, much of the Onward platform’s existing content appears to focus on improving oil and gas outcomes, an analysis by Drilled and the Guardian has found. The site’s “Projects” section is a short-term job board hosting dozens of jobs in oil and gas exploration (the hiring companies are kept anonymous). Of the five projects with available descriptions, all but one are explicitly for oil and gas production, while many more of the archived jobs on the platform also appear to be for oil and gas.

One posting asks for applicants to conduct a “coherent petroleum system assessment”; another looks for candidates able “to understand subsurface fluid resource estimates along the US Gulf Coast”. Another advertises a position to map reservoirs using seismic analysis in the Nile Delta. Projects like Onward “[allow] Shell to pretend it’s helping find solutions instead of just accelerating the climate crisis”, Paris Marx, a technology critic and host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, told Drilled.

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The emphasis on collaboration to solve the climate crisis is one that consistently crops up in oil and gas public communication, said Melissa Aronczyk, a professor of journalism and media at Rutgers University. “Behind the idea of collaboration is the idea that everyone is an equal stakeholder in this movement, that we are all in together to combat climate change,” she said. “But that’s really not what’s going on.” Aroczyk pointed out that at recent UN climate meetings, oil and gas companies, their lobbyists, and other polluters have been consistently invited to the table under the guise of collaboration – invitations that have enabled them to further block needed action.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/26/shell-climate-tech-startup-onward-oil-gas-jobs-greenwashing