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Shell is one of the world's biggest energy companies, finding, producing, refining, and selling oil and gas, and increasingly selling electricity and low-carbon fuels too.
Shell is one of the world's largest energy companies, and its business runs in two big directions at once. One side finds and pulls oil and gas out of the ground, then turns that crude into the fuels that move cars, trucks, ships, and planes. The other side sells those products to people and businesses — through gas stations, to airlines and shipping firms, and to factories that need fuel or raw materials for making plastics and chemicals.
The way it makes money is mostly a spread game. Shell spends money to find, drill, and refine, then sells the output at whatever price the global market sets. When oil and gas prices are high, that gap gets fat and profits pour in; when prices crash, the same operation can lose money. This is why Shell's results swing so hard from year to year, and why it has spent the last several years trying to smooth things out. Part of that smoothing is a big push beyond oil. Shell bought a large electricity and gas retail business, sells power to homes and businesses in several countries, and is building out charging for electric vehicles and lower-carbon fuels. Managers describe the goal as selling more energy to more customers, with a grabbier mix over time. The company has also gotten leaner — it cut costs aggressively and returned a lot of cash to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, which shrink the number of shares and lift the value of each one.
The honest tension is that Shell is still, at heart, an oil and gas company. Environmental groups criticize it for continuing to develop fossil fuel projects, and some investors push it to move faster on climate. Shell answers that the world still needs reliable energy, and that it can fund the transition best by staying profitable today. That argument — how fast to change while still paying the bills — is the central question hanging over the whole business.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026