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Economic

Our income in 2011 was $30.9 billion and we announced dividends of more than $10 billion for our shareholders. Our capital investment of over $31 billion will help to build and sustain our business for the future. We also spent $1.1 billion on our research and development programme.

We continued to focus our efforts on those markets where we see the best potential for growth. A number of major projects started production in 2011: the Pearl GTL (gas-to-liquids) plant (Shell interest 100%) in Qatar that can produce 140,000 barrels of oil equivalent (boe) a day of synthetic oil products and 120,000 boe a day of condensates, liquid petroleum gas and ethane; the 7.8 million tonnes-a-year Qatargas 4 LNG facility (Shell interest 30%) also in Qatar; the final phase of the 100,000 boe-a-day Athabasca Oil Sands Project expansion (Shell interest 60%) in Canada; and enhanced oil recovery projects at Qarn Alam (Shell interest 34%) in Oman and Schoonebeek (Shell interest 30%) in the Netherlands. We also launched Raízen (Shell interest 50%) that produces the lowest-CO2 biofuel commercially available today, ethanol from sugar cane in Brazil.

In 2011, Shell’s oil and gas production was 3.2 million boe a day, slightly down from 2010. We increased our sales of liquefied natural gas (LNG) by 12% to 19 million tonnes. We had seven notable oil and gas discoveries, and we replaced 99% of our production with additions to our proved reserves.

Shell scorecard

In 2011, sustainable development continued to account for 20% of the company scorecard, which helps determine the annual bonus levels for all our employees, including members of the Shell Executive Committee (EC). For the EC in 2011, sustainable development measures were split evenly between Shell’s safety performance and targeted measures covering operational spills, energy efficiency and use of fresh water.