Royal Dutch Shell delivered strong Q2 2021 financial results with adjusted earnings increased to $5.5 billion, from $3.2 billion in Q1. The company’s adjusted EBITDA, was $13.5 billion on a current cost of supplies basis. And the company delivered $14.2 billion of cash flow from operations excluding working capital movements. This shows that the company is well positioned to benefit from the global economic recovery.

The company announced the launch of a $2 billion share buyback program that it aims to complete by the end of the year.

The company’s performance was particularly strong in marketing, boosted by outstanding performance in retail. Good margin management and growing convenience retail resulted in one of the best quarterly results for retail in the last decade. And our cash conversion was once again robust, across all businesses, which shows the quality of our portfolio.

Ben Van Beurden, Chief Executive Officer, Royal Dutch Shell, commented: “The past year has proven to be challenging. In this environment, our operations, our supply chains and our people have shown immense resilience and we have continuously delivered safe operations, robust business performance and unmatched cash flows. So, although volatility in commodity prices and demand recovery might still continue for some time, we are confident in the strength of our cash generation potential.

“Therefore, we are moving to the next phase of our capital allocation framework and we are stepping up distributions to our shareholders. We are rebasing our dividend and launching share buybacks this quarter, which Jessica will cover in more detail in a moment.

“In our Powering Progress strategy, we are moving at pace to a net-zero emissions company purposefully and profitably. We are providing energy that the world needs today, while also building the energy business of the future. That is what Powering Progress is about.

“So today, I will share the progress we are making in three areas: hydrogen, refining and carbon capture and storage technology - or CCS. In hydrogen, we are building on our leading position. By 2035, we aim to achieve a double-digit share of sales of clean hydrogen, which is a market poised for growth.

“We are currently offering our customers the opportunity to fuel with hydrogen across 50 sites for light-duty vehicles globally. And recently, we opened the first hydrogen station for trucks in the United States, and in the Netherlands, buses can refuel within 10 minutes. With a full tank of 25 kilos of hydrogen, buses can travel over 400 kilometres. These are the first steps in building an extensive hydrogen network. In Europe, we are partnering with Daimler to roll out a hydrogen-refuelling network of 1200 kilometres which will join three green hydrogen production hubs. We have also started up Europe's largest PEM electrolyser in Germany for the production of green hydrogen with 10 megawatts capacity and plans are under way to expand it to 100 megawatts.

“In refining, our strategy is to concentrate our portfolio into 5 Energy & Chemicals parks by the end of the decade, and that's from 8 refineries as of today. Our updated target reflects the sale of the Deer Park refinery. And, even in a challenging environment for refining, we have been making great progress in rationalising our portfolio and divesting refineries for value. And, by divesting, closing or converting our refineries, we are reducing Shell's Scope 1 and 2 emissions from refining by around 50% since 2018.

“With CCS, as part of our strategy to reduce our own carbon emissions and those of our customers, we aim to capture and store an additional 25 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2035.

And we have recently made announcements on two important CCS projects – Polaris at our Scotford facility in Canada, and the Acorn project in the UK. These will help us deliver lowcarbon energy solutions to our customers and they make important contributions to our 2035 CCS ambition.

This is tremendous progress across our business pillars in delivering our strategy and while we transform and build the business of the future, our financial delivery remains strong.”