It's a pretty pragmatic call: Shell has decades of experience with large scale chemistry operations, and the oil majors have been hiring all the smartest engine

It's a pretty pragmatic call: Shell has decades of experience with large scale chemistry operations, and the oil majors have been hiring all the smartest engineers in the field for decades, similar to how FAANG hovers up much of the software engineering talent by offering humongous salaries. If there is any company that has a decent chance at success for scaling up carbon capture technology, it is probably Shell or one of their main competitors. This type of hardware-based market is much less amenable to the type of startup-driven innovation that we see in the software world, because building a large scale chemical plant is so incredibly expensive.