Shell to allow consumers to offset carbon emissions — at the gas station

CALGARY You could soon be able to wash away your carbon footprint at your gas station.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc is rolling out a program in Europe that will allocate as much as two cents per litre from the sale of gasoline at its stations to replant forests. The initiative could come to Canada soon, as the company plans to roll it out to the general public.

Chief executive Ben van Beurden says the company first piloted the project in the U.K. and the Netherlands. It would allow consumers to “offset all of these carbon emissions at extremely low carbon prices,” the CEO told energy executives at the IHS CERA conference in Houston earlier this month.

“This means that everybody who has a car can actually be carbon free — they don’t have to buy an electric car,” said van Beurden, who annoyed his oil and gas colleagues last year when he said the next car he purchases would be electric.

Shell Canada spokesperson Cameron Yost said the pilot project allowed U.K. customers to volunteer to contribute to a wildlife project in Kenya in November 2017 to “help Shell understand customers’ interest in balancing the carbon footprint of the fuel they purchase from us.”

Yost said he had no further detail to share on future plans for the program, but van Beurden said in Houston: “We are now rolling it out across Europe and into the general public.”

IHS Markit vice-chairman Daniel Yergin described the idea as a “carbon sink” at a fill-up station during the conference, referring to the ability to absorb the carbon produced by burning gasoline.

The use of proceeds from gasoline sales to replant forests is one way Shell aims to meet its goal of reducing its net carbon footprint by 50 per cent by 2050, van Beurden said.

Shell is not alone. Competitors in Canada have begun preparing for the rise of electric vehicles as a threat to their market and preparing for the competitive challenge of Shell’s new program.

Calgary-based Parkland Fuel Corp., which owns 1,841 fill-up stations across Canada and parts of the U.S., is currently evaluating a new loyalty program that will — among other features — consider “sustainability,” company spokesperson Annie Cuerrier said.