‘We’re not an oil company,” says Ben van Beurden from across the table. It is an affable, but pointed intervention typical of the man leading the FTSE 100’s highest-valued business.

“I don’t want to be facetious or pedantic,” he continues good-naturedly. “But we are a much broader and more sophisticated company than one that produces oil. We produce much more gas than we do oil, for a start.”

For the boss of Royal Dutch Shell, the distinction is one that rings at the heart of a personal mission to transform a company which for over a hundred years has fuelled the development of the modern world.

It is just days since the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned the world that even greater ambition is needed to guard the planet against global temperature rises which threaten an environmental catastrophe.

It is also a year since van Beurden announced Shell’s plan to cut half of its carbon emissions by 2050, and 20pc by 2035.

He is, of course, correct. Shell’s presence in the modern world is easy to overlook but impossible to avoid. Far beyond the fossil fuels which power the modern world – from passenger vehicles to the grind of industrial machinery – Shell produces the asphalt which paves roads and the chemical building blocks used in plastics, paints and the sunscreen on your skin.