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He is tough, but approachable; he gives the impression of idealism, and smilingly refuses to be drawn into any criticisms of his company.
But Oxburgh also has a reputation for independence and, in these last two months before he retires from the chairmanship, a fierce need to talk about the future. "Look, Shell is an energy company, not an oil company, and the fact is that neither Shell nor any other energy company is going to be doing business in the same way in 25 years' time." Already Shell "can't actually make enough solar panels at the moment to satisfy demand". So far it has spent $1.5bn, more than any other company, he says, on renewables. (To put this in context, the cost of getting one oilfield up and running can reach $10bn, though funding can come from a variety of sources.)
But these are early days for biofuels and renewable energy, and early days too for a method many including Oxburgh tout as a possible eureka: carbon sequestration, which involves trapping the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels and storing it, usually underground, in the cavities where the oil, natural gas, or coal came from in the first place. It's a possible option in the North Sea and in the US, but more difficult in India and China, where abundant cheap brown coal produces relatively high levels of CO2 but where there are few obvious places to store it.
Which brings up another, potentially far greater, problem. As Oxburgh points out, China, India, Brazil and Mexico are rapidly emerging markets, and "as countries grow and become more prosperous, they use more energy. It is a sad fact that if these countries experience the perfectly legitimate growth in GDP [gross domestic product] that they have a right to expect, and they do so in the same energy-inefficient way that we have seen our prosperity grow, then I think we are wasting our time. Because, frankly, the numbers of people are so large, and the rate of change is so great, that there will be simply no hope of meeting our targets by 2050." China, for example, "is opening a new, old-fashioned, dirty, full-sized power station at the rate of one a fortnight." (The developing world, not surprisingly, will be most affected by climate change: Africa is forecast to get warmer at double the rate of anywhere else and, says David King, will soon be feeling the effects of climate change at a level rivaling the effects of the HIV epidemic.)
This is the sort of issue that must be dealt with at government level, and governments are notoriously blind beyond the next election, not to mention worried about upsetting powerful corporations. Yet just a couple of weeks ago Shell and 12 other signatories, including BP, sent an open letter to Tony Blair, in which they pointed out that "governments tend to feel limited in their ability to introduce new policies for reducing
emissions because they fear business resistance, while companies are unable to take their investments in low-carbon solutions to scale because of lack of long-term policies," and urged immediate action. Oxburgh advocates that government uses the controls at its disposal: "Regulate biofuels. Or subsidise. Or tax" - any incentive really, but "what we don't want to see is in two years' time the government simply becoming bored with climate change after we've invested a lot of our shareholders' money. Remember, those shareholders are pension funds and other similar organizations." The prospect of big business forcing government to regulate it would be funny, if it weren't so serious.
Meanwhile, the price of oil is high at $55 a barrel, and the oil companies don't see it falling substantially in the near future. At the current rate of progress, says Oxburgh, "we are going to be really quite dependent on fossil fuels for another 50 years. And nothing is going to slow the world economy more, and inhibit our control of the greenhouse gas problem, than a world recession. So, fundamentally, what we are trying to do
worldwide is to make sure that we have enough of a supply of oil and gas." Paradoxically, the high price of oil is also good for renewable energy, as it forces the speedier development of alternatives, and Oxburgh just views this as a further business opportunity: corn ethanol, to take the example of a biofuel currently in use, currently costs nearly as much as oil.
Shell, therefore, is in no trouble. But the planet is, and Oxburgh sees no point in mincing words. "The boat is sinking, and we have to use everything that we possibly can."
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