Shell’s ‘green’ ad campaign banned in UK for being ‘likely to mislead’

An ad campaign by Shell promoting its green initiatives has been banned for not telling consumers that most of its business is based on environmentally damaging fossil fuels such as petrol.

Shell, which has set goals to become a net zero carbon energy company by 2050 while also expanding its gas business by a fifth, ran a TV, poster and YouTube campaign pushing renewable electricity, wind and car charging point initiatives.

“From electric vehicle charging to renewable electricity for your home, Shell is giving customers more low-carbon choices and helping drive the UK’s energy transition,” the company says in one of the ads. “The UK is ready for cleaner energy.”

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which has also banned “green” ads in the UK by Spanish oil company Repsol and Malaysia’s Petronas for not providing full information on their activities and carbon reduction strategies, investigated the Shell ad after a complaint by campaigning group Adfree Cities.

Shell said that the aim of the ads was to raise awareness of the range of lower emission energy products it offers, and that mentioning high-carbon Shell products would be “counter productive” and “dilute the impact of the ads’ positive environmental message”.

The ad ban prompted the energy company to criticise the advertising watchdog’s decision as “shortsighted”, saying it risked slowing the UK’s desire to move to renewable energy.

“We strongly disagree with the ASA’s decision, which could slow the UK’s drive towards renewable energy,” said a spokesperson for Shell. “People are already well aware that Shell produces the oil and gas they depend on today. When customers fill up at our petrol stations across the UK, it’s under the instantly recognisable Shell logo.”

Shell said the ads focused only on the delivery of electricity to UK consumers via its subsidiary Shell Energy UK. The company said it was a “relatively minor” part of its business that consumers were unlikely to infer was meant to send a message about “the overall impact or balance of Shell’s operations”.

The ASA said that while many consumers would associate Shell with environmentally detrimental energy products derived from fossil fuels, such as petrol, they are also aware that companies in these sectors are aiming to dramatically reduce emissions in response to the climate crisis.

“However, they [are] unlikely to be aware of the details of this in relation to specific companies,” the ASA said. “Ads [are] therefore likely to mislead consumers if they [have] misrepresented the contribution that lower-carbon initiatives played, or would play in the near future, as part of the overall balance of a company’s activities.”

The ASA said that nature of the ads – which also said that 1.4m UK homes use 100% renewable electricity from Shell Energy, that it is fitting 50,000 electric vehicle chargers nationwide by 2025 and working on wind power for 6m homes – gave the overall impression that low-carbon energy products comprised a “significant proportion of the energy products Shell invested in and sold in the UK in 2022, or were likely to do so in the near future.”

A Shell spokesperson said: “No energy transition can be successful if people are not aware of the alternatives available to them. That is what our adverts set out to show, and that is why we’re concerned by this shortsighted decision.”However, the ASA cited Shell’s 2021 Sustainability Report, which showed its operations produced greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1,375m tonnes of carbon dioxide.

We understood that large-scale oil and gas investment and extraction comprised the vast majority of the company’s business model in 2022 and would continue to do so in the near future,” said the ASA. “Because the ads did not include such information, we concluded that they omitted material information and were likely to mislead.”

Last month, Shell was accused of embarking on a “profiteering bonanza” after it made record first-quarter profits of more than $9.6bn (£7.6bn), after reporting $40bn (£32bn) in profits in 2022, the biggest in the company’s 115-year history.

“Fossil fuel giants like Shell can’t greenwash their way out of the climate emergency,” said Caroline Lucas, an MP for the Green party. “Their glitzy advertisements can no longer conceal their climate criminal behaviour – polluting the planet, raking in record profits, and sanitising their own image to continue the climate-wrecking cycle.”

In April, the ASA banned an ad campaign by Etihad Airways trumpeting its approach to “sustainable aviation”, ruling it was misleading consumers over the environmental impact of flying.

In March, the UK ad watchdog banned a campaign by the German airline Lufthansa which claimed that its green initiatives were protecting the world.

cover photo:Shell said that the aim of the ads was to raise awareness of the range of lower emission energy products it offers and called the decision ‘shortsighted’. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images