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“Yes, we finally unloaded that piece of crap in Denmark we’ve been trying to sell for decades,” Shell’s Steve Lesher told California lobbyist Gavin McHugh last spring. “I wouldn’t put that in this GHG-sensitivity category. That was just a crappy facility.”
This exchange appears in a trove of emails and other materials recently made public by a House Oversight Committee investigation into oil industry greenwashing. And the “piece of crap in Denmark” Lesher refers to was probably a refinery in Fredericia owned by Shell’s Danish subsidiary, which was sold to Postlane Partners, a Connecticut-based private equity firm, in early 2021.
..Sometimes, selling off assets means more emissions. In 2017, Shell sold all of its onshore oil and gas operations in Gabon—including five operational oil fields, a pipeline network, and an export terminal—to a portfolio company of the private equity firm Carlyle Group called Assala Energy, for $628 million. While production had been declining in the years leading up to the sale, Assala invested heavily to reverse that after it acquired Shell’s Gabon properties, and has since doubled production in the expansive Rabi oil field.
…But overall, selling off polluting assets tends not to do much for the planet. A 2021 Bloomberg investigation found that BP reported a 16 percent drop in operational emissions after it sold off its Alaskan business to the little-known Texas firm Hilcorp for $5.6 billion. Production on those same assets climbed 5 percent over the year before the sale, increasing emissions by an amount equivalent to putting 108,000 new cars on the road. A study published this spring from the Environmental Defense Fund found a dramatic spike in flaring at a Nigerian oil field after Shell, Total, and Eni sold off their holdings in the country. According to the same study, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Total, Eni, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Equinor are expected to sell off $111 billion worth of assets in the coming years.
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