日本炼油厂关闭 引发国际油价下跌

-Let's talk about the Japan crisis. How worried are you that this could curtail demand for oil?

-Yeah, good morning. Let me first say that obviously our thoughts and our condolences are with the Japanese people, and Shell is trying to supply as much fuel oil and as much energy as we can in order to help batch the recovery work in Japan. I think you have to distinguish between long-term and short-term balances of oil and gas. Actually, in the shorter term, I don't see a huge pressure on the volume, on the supply for oil, because we have got quite a bit of spare capacity in the OPEC, and I think that's what they can actually bring to the market. In the longer term, as I said before quite clearly, the emerging markets are driving the demand. If they keep going in the same way as we have seen them actually growing over the last three years, over the next four or five years, it's quite possible that we on the supply side can actually not cover all the new demand which is coming, and therefore you could see rising oil and gas prices over time. So from that point of view, it's important to actually, to keep investing, which Shell has done over the last four, five, six years, and we have never slowed down, we had the highest investment during the crisis. And I think this is absolutely needed in order to get that. The effect of Japan…

-Sorry, Mr. Voser. How are you positioning yourself as a company for the reduction in demands, specifically coming from Japan? This was the world's second largest economy until recently.

-I think we are not positioning it for the short term, as I just said. We will actually go through whatever cycle comes and actually keep investing in the supply of oil and gas. This is clearly the key driver for us to be ready when, whenever the demand comes back. We have done that in the past and we will do this also in the future. So it's a little bit early to say how much the demand will be affected by Japan, but there will be clearly some effects, but these will not affect the strategy of Shell, which is a very long-term strategy.

-Let's talk about the fallouts from the nuclear incidents that we are seeing at the Fukushima Daiichi plants. Does that mean, would you expect Japan to switch more towards fossil fuels for the future, and now you are positioning yourself in the long term for that kind of demand?

-Again, I think, in the shorter term, it's quite clear that we need to help and supply fuel oil and also gas into Japan to actually replace some of the nuclear power generation which is now out of service. And I'm very pleased that we actually have agreed the first energy ship to go into Japan, and that was actually raised last night. I think it's a little bit early to speculate on how these all will come out at the end in three, four, five, six years' time, how much nuclear power will still be in Japan, how much will be there as switching into gas, which is a fossil fuel, which is very acceptable from a CO2 point of view. It reduces immediately CO2 footprint etc. I think we will see how this actually develops in the medium and longer term. It is too early to speculate. But in general, we see gas growth across Asia-Pacific as a key driver for the economy, and Shell is the biggest player there, and we want to maintain that position.