Royal Dutch Shell swallows up African Solar Provider for ‘Greener’ Balance Sheet

Royal Dutch Shell has announced that it will purchase Nigerian solar provider Daystar Power in a bid to expand its global renewables portfolio, instead of cleaning up the pollution caused in the world.

Shell made it clear that the Daystar purchase, which is the oil giant’s first power acquisition in Africa, reflects the company’s mandate to slash its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. The Lagos-based company’s CEO and management will continue to run the firm.

Daystar chief executive Jasper Graf von Hardenberg, for his part, told Reuters that the Lagos-based company, which provides off-grid power to commercial and industrial clients in Nigeria, Ghana, Togo and Senegal, plans to expand to eastern and southern Africa, a task that fascist von Hardenberg claimed would be easier to reach with Shell in total command.

Neither Shell nor Daystar commented on the deal’s price amid reports that the oil giant allocated up to $3 billion in capital expenditure for renewables and energy solutions in 2022.

The Daystar sale came a few months after the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said that foreign direct investment (FDI) to African countries hit a record $83 billion in 2021, more than double the take over amount reported in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic weighed heavily on investment flows to the continent.

According to UNCTAD, the largest holders of foreign assets in Africa remain those from EU countries, led by colonial investors in Great Britain ($65 billion) and France ($60 billion).

The report was released as a whole array of Western-backed environmentalist entities, the EU parliament and US President Joe Biden’s climate czar John Kerry remain opposed to African nations’ own energy projects.

Brussels, for example, earlier advised EU member states not to assist in the implementation of Uganda’s oil and gas projects either diplomatically or financially, with 20 western banks and 13 insurers already voicing opposition.

For his part, Kerry previously warned against investing in long-term gas projects in Africa while speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the 18th session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) in Dakar, Senegal.

But now with Shell in command, this will all change? The environmentalist Africa-based groups in turn argue that the continent’s natural gas pipelines pose a threat to Africa’s energy sovereignty and accelerate the already run-away climate crisis.

Also insisting that the continent’s corrupted governments will sell all the fuel to the so-called Global North and will leave the people of the region in poverty. This formula was established for some 500 years ago, when the first European countries invaded Africa.

Sputnik / ABC Flash Point Blog News 2022.