Shell is suing Greenpeace for $2.1m in damages in one of the biggest ever legal claims against the environmental group after its protesters occupied a floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) unit for 13 days earlier this year.
The lawsuit follows an incident in January when Greenpeace activists boarded the Shell-contracted heavy-load vessel White Marlin north of the Canary Islands, carrying Shell’s FPSO to the Penguins oil and gas field in the UK North Sea.
At the time of the protest, which lasted until February 12, Shell and its co-claimant, FPSO builder Fluor, claimed they would seek damages in court.
The parties were offered to resolve the dispute out of court. According to Greenpeace, Shell said the damages would be over $8m but offered to settle for a reduced amount of $1.4m damages, and an indefinite block on all protests at its infrastructure at sea or in port anywhere in the world.
Greenpeace rejected the offer in October, saying that they would agree to such a protest ban if Shell complied with the Netherlands court order in 2021 requiring the company to reduce its emissions by 45% by 2030, relative to 2019, across all activities.
The UK-based oil and gas major that filed the claim in London’s High Court said the damages represented the legal costs of securing two previous injunctions against the protesters and other expenses, including mobilising an extra safety vessel. The claims could rise to a total of $8.6m if Shell contractors also pursue damages.
In what it described as an “intimidation lawsuit” the environmental organisation said Shell’s claim represented “one of the biggest legal threats against the Greenpeace network’s ability to campaign in its more than 50-year history”.
Areeba Hamid, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, accused Shell of “trying to crush Greenpeace’s ability to campaign, and in doing so, seeking to silence legitimate demands for climate justice and payment for loss and damage”.
“We need this case to be thrown out and for Shell to be regulated by the government because it’s clear Sawan is hell-bent on profit, regardless of human cost,” she said.
The Penguins FPSO is the first newly operated vessel for Shell in the northern North Sea for 30 years. The field has been producing oil since 2002 and its life extension project is expected to deliver 45,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day at peak production.
