Royal Dutch Shell sees natural gas as a destination fuel, not a transition fuel towards a net-zero economy, Kallanish Energy reports.

Speaking at the Gastech Virtual Summit on Monday, Maarten Wetselaar, Shell’s Integrated Gas & New Energies director, said the world will still need oil and gas for decades, with gas accounting for 40% of all additional energy demand from now to 2035.

“We still cannot model a large power markets that runs without natural gas even 30 years from now. I can not think how you would ever produce petrochemicals without starting with a molecule, and the natural gas is the obvious one,” he said.

“Net-zero does mean we work harder as an industry, and we work harder as a company on the net-zero piece, on the mitigation of the carbon, on nature, on CCS (carbon capture storage), he added.

Shell plans to become a net-zero company by 2050 or sooner, and sees the challenge of tackling climate change as an “opportunity to build back better.”

“Now our current business plan won’t get us there, so they will have to change overtime,” he said, adding Shell will sell a lot more low-carbon products and scale up investments in cleaner energy. It will also work with customers to reduce their emissions.

Wetselaar defended the O&G industry “can and should be a driving force” towards a net-zero economy. If the world is to limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, it needs ways to offset, mitigate these “hard to avoid emissions,” he said.

“That’s why we are trying to invest ahead of the curve in order to make that negative, that carbon sink piece of the story, really visible and credible. Because only if it’s visible and credible, will people start to accept the fact that natural gas will actually be there in the end as well,” the director said.

This post appeared first on Kallanish Energy News.