Justin Fox, Columnist

Stop Calling Shell an Oil Company

A big acquisition for Shell and a bet that natural gas is the fuel of the future.

April 8, 2015 at 7:05 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Maybe the name doesn't say it all.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov?Bloomberg

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Can we stop calling Royal Dutch Shell an oil company, or even an oil and gas company? The majority of its proved reserves have long been in natural gas, not oil. If its $70 billion acquisition of the company formerly known as British Gas (BG Group) goes through, the reserves breakdown will be 8.9 billion barrel-of-oil equivalents of natural gas1428515693292 to 7.8 billion barrels of oil (that includes synthetic crude, bitumen and natural gas liquids). It’s a gas and oil company!

Of the “oil majors,” Shell and Total are the only two with their reserves mainly in natural gas, although all of them -- especially ExxonMobil! -- have a lot of gas reserves to go with their oil.