Shell Retail Looks to the Future With Car Charging
Bloomberg News

Shell set up its first hydrogen refueling station in the U.K. earlier this year and will install its first electric car charging point later this month, said John Abbott, the top executive of its downstream business, which includes refining, marketing, retail, trading and chemicals. By 2025, he expects these new operations supplying cleaner fuels, including natural gas, to make up a fifth of margins from selling fuel.

Shell, still doesn’t quite get it. They are trying to preserve legacy methods of fueling involving tanks, tanker trucks, and all the plumbing that goes with fossil fuels (I include hydrogen since it is generally made from natural gas). It may seem like a way to preserve their capital investment, but really they are just making their stations WAY more expensive, since they will have to install more storage tanks and fueling hardware, which just mean spending LOTS of money and creating a very complex, expensive to maintain site, that will also complicate the logistics of scheduling deliveries of natural gas and hydrogen on top of the diesel/gasoline products already carried.

Oh, and you are adding the dangers of H2 and NG “spills” to the risk of gasoline/diesel spills. So, each time you resupply a station, you triple the number of chances something can wrong.

It’s simple guys. You have electrical wires right there above your station. Installing chargers is a matter of tapping the existing electrical infrastructure and setting aside some spaces for charging EVs. Simple installation, nothing to resupply multiple times a week, fewer tanker trucks on the road burning diesel.