Shell plc

Our approach is governed by our Safety, Environment and Asset Management (SEAM) Standards, which set out our detailed requirements for personal, process and transport safety.

See "Our approach to sustainability" on page 145.

Assurance activities play a key role for Shell in providing real-time feedback about our assets, businesses and functions regarding the health of critical human and technical safeguards that help prevent a safety incident. Our assurance activities aim to verify the design and functioning of controls, validate the overall efficiency of risk management, and highlight areas for improvement.

We report data in this section on a 100% basis for companies and joint ventures in which Shell is the operator, unless stated otherwise.

Technology and safety

We are using digitalisation and artificial intelligence to gather and process data from our equipment and improve analysis and reporting. This enables remote support and allows us to take action quickly in unsafe situations.

For example, we have installed T-Pulse, an AI-automated safety monitoring solution developed by Detect Technologies, at 26 sites.

T-Pulse uses CCTV to identify and report real-time safety issues and unsafe behaviours. Since we began using T-Pulse in 2020, it has generated alerts for more than 20,000 potential safety issues. In more than 1,300 of those cases, interventions helped prevent significant harm to people or leaks into the environment.

We are installing active fatigue and distraction detection (AFDD) devices in vehicles operated by Shell employees or our contractors in countries where road transport risks are highest. These devices help us intervene earlier to prevent accidents by detecting the conditions that can lead to them.

Personal safety

We continue to strengthen the safety culture and leadership among our employees and contractors. This aligns with our focus on caring for people.

Our SEAM Standards establish requirements for occupational health and safety hazards that have the potential to result in harm to people. When our employees and contractors perform tasks, we expect them to consider the hazards that could potentially cause harm and the effectiveness of the barriers in place to prevent incidents and manage the consequences should an event occur. We establish and maintain competence management systems to help ensure people are competent to perform their roles and responsibilities.

We run safety awareness programmes and hold an annual global Safety Day to give employees and contractors time to discuss safety culture on the frontline, reflect on how to prevent incidents, and how to improve performance. In 2024, the focus was on "Before I start work", which means pausing to reflect on what needs to be in place before we start work, for that work to be done safely.

Strategic Report| Performance in the year| Safety continued

Process safety

Process safety management is about keeping hazardous substances inside pipes, tanks and vessels, and ensuring that well fluids are contained during construction, interventions (such as maintenance) and incidents. Our SEAM Standards establish requirements from project design and construction throughout the life cycle of the asset to keep sites, employees, contractors and communities safe.

Our SEAM Standards set the steps we take to manage process safety risks, from identifying potential safety hazards to designing the controls that prevent them from occurring. Our standards require the use of barriers that operate independently of each other to reduce the likelihood of a release becoming catastrophic. Such barriers are designed so that if one fails, this does not lead to the failure of others.

We are focusing on standardising our risk assessment tools, improving human performance, working to mitigate process safety risks and moving from lagging indicators (measuring past outcomes) to leading indicators (predicting future performance). With the implementation of the SEAM Standards, our assurance methodologies for process safety have been updated to provide more insight on the health of barriers designed to reduce the likelihood of leaks and mitigate any potential consequences should a leak occur.

We continue to learn from investigations into industry incidents and embed this knowledge into our process safety standards and training programmes.

Preparing for emergencies

We prepare and practise our emergency response to incidents, such as a spill or a fire. This involves working closely with local emergency services and regulatory agencies to jointly test our plans and procedures. Shell requires key operating facilities to test their emergency response preparedness as per regulatory requirements and aligned to industry best practices. In 2024, we held large-scale emergency response exercises at Shell Energy and Chemicals Park Rotterdam in the Netherlands and in Perth, Australia for offshore exploration to support our Prelude floating LNG facility.

We manage three regional Emergency Response Leadership Councils for the Americas; Asia-Pacific; and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The councils bring together experts from different teams that need to be able to work together seamlessly in case of emergencies. In 2024, the councils' annual regional conferences covered a variety of topics such as lessons learned, dynamic risk assessments, new response technology, non-fluorinated firefighting foam tactics and response preparedness.

Transport safety

Transporting large numbers of people, products and equipment poses safety risks. We seek to reduce these risks by developing best-practice standards within Shell. We also work with specialist contractors, industry bodies, non-governmental organisations and governments to find ways of reducing transport safety risks.

Road safety

In 2024, we continued to focus on strengthening our controls and implementing technologies that help us to better detect the conditions which can lead to incidents. Our SEAM Standards require Shell employees and contractors who are identified as driving on work-related business to receive defensive driver training.

In 2024, Shell employees and contractors drove around 424 million kilometres on company business, equivalent to around 10,580 times around the world. Commercial road transport accounts for most of the kilometres driven. There were 17 severe motor vehicle incidents (SMVIs). An SMVI is defined as a motor vehicle incident resulting in a fatality, serious injury or a rollover of a vehicle. There were no road transport-related fatalities in 2024.

Maritime safety

At the end of 2024, we managed and operated a global fleet of 22 tankers, liquefied natural gas carriers and the world's first liquefied hydrogen carrier. We are one of the world's largest charterers of oil and gas vessels. We work with our global maritime partners through our Maritime Partners in Safety Programme to improve the safety performance of the shipping industry.

Air safety

In 2024, for Shell-operated ventures, our owned and contracted aircraft flew around 37,000 hours and carried around 292,000 Shell and contractor passengers to destinations across the world. In addition, remotely piloted aircraft completed flights on surveys, inspections, emissions surveillance, and security and incident response.

See shell.com for more information on transport safety.

Working with others

We work with contractors and suppliers to help them understand our safety requirements. We strive to improve the energy industry's safety performance by sharing safety standards and experience with other operators, joint-venture partners, contractors and professional organisations.

Executives from Shell and our major contractor companies have collaborated on Shell's contractor safety leadership programme since 2014. The programme seeks to identify strategies and practical ways to improve a shared safety culture and achieve our Goal Zero ambition of no harm and no leaks.

Photo: A safety briefing for a maintenance and operations crew at the 731.5 megawatt Borssele III and IV offshore wind farm, the Netherlands, which is owned and operated by the Blauwwind joint venture (Shell interest 20%).

Strategic Report| Performance in the year| Safety continued

Safety performance

Tragically, two of our contractor colleagues in Shell-operated ventures lost their lives in incidents which happened in 2024 while working for us. One contractor colleague in the Netherlands lost his life in an accident at Shell Energy and Chemicals Park Moerdijk in June 2024. Another contractor colleague in India was bitten by a snake in May 2024 and subsequently passed away in January 2025.

We sadly note that a contractor who sustained burn injuries in a flash fire at our EcoOils facility in Malaysia in February 2025 passed away later that month. The investigation into the incident remained under way at the time of publishing this report.

The death in February 2024 of a contractor colleague in Nigeria, who was injured in a fire incident in December 2023, was reported in our 2023 Annual Report.

Shell is profoundly impacted by these losses. We are resolutely committed to learn from these incidents and we aim to take all necessary measures to prevent anything similar from happening again. We continue to work closely with our contractors to help build a strong safety culture at the frontline.

We use serious injury, illness and fatality (SIF) and serious injury, illness and fatality frequency (SIF-F) to measure our safety performance. SIF is defined as a serious work-related injury or illness that resulted in a fatality or a permanent impairment, which is defined as a long-term or permanent injury or illness with a significant impact on daily activities. SIF-F is calculated by dividing the number of employee and contractor SIF by 100 million working hours. SIF-F enables us to focus our investigations on the most serious incidents. The aim is to collect and analyse relevant, high-quality data that can help us improve our efforts to prevent serious injuries and fatalities.

In 2024, the number of serious work-related injuries or illnesses, including those that resulted in fatality or permanent impairment, decreased to 7 from 12 in 2023. The SIF-F was 1.5 cases per 100 million working hours compared with 2.6 in 2023.

For reporting on process safety, we combine Tier 1 and 2 events. A Tier 1 process safety event is an unplanned or uncontrolled release of any material from a process, including non-toxic and non-flammable materials, with the greatest actual consequence resulting in harm to employees, contract staff or a neighbouring community, damage to equipment, or exceeding a defined threshold quantity. A Tier 2 process safety event is a release of lesser consequence.

The number of Tier 1 and 2 operational process safety events in 2024 increased compared with 2023. There were 90 events reported during the year compared with 63 in 2023. The increase in process safety tiered events was driven by our Downstream, Renewables and Energy Solutions business. We are actively addressing these challenges by refining our operational strategies, renewing our focus on fundamentals and leveraging new technologies to return to the downward trend of previous years.

A well control incident is defined as a well set-up with fewer than two barriers in place to protect it against a release through any potential path. In 2024, there were no Level 1 or Level 2 well control incidents in Shell-operated ventures. There were also no events in 2023.

As part of our learner mindset approach, we investigate serious incidents so we can understand the underlying causes, including technical, behavioural, organisational and human factors. We share what we learn, including with contractors. We implement mitigations at the site and in the country and business where the incident occurred. We seek to turn incident findings into improved standards or better ways of working that can be applied widely across similar facilities.

Security

Our operations expose us to criminality, civil unrest, activism, terrorism, cyber disruption and acts of war that could have a material adverse effect on our business. Our security risk mitigations follow the principles of "deter, detect, delay and respond". We strengthen the security of our assets, people and operations to reduce our exposure as appropriate, for example, by conducting site security risk assessments, using journey management plans and performing travel risk assessments. We also invest in information risk management capabilities and crisis management and business continuity measures.

Shell is a member of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (VPSHR), a multi-stakeholder initiative that gives guidance on how to respect human rights while providing security for business operations. We implement this guidance within our own operations, concentrating on countries where the risks of working with government and private security providers are identified as greatest.