Shell's future is looking rosy, Jeroen van der Veer tells Christopher Hope, in spite of Gordon Brown's tax bill. No Shell projects in the North Sea have been cancelled - yet. "As things stand today we put the taxes into the sum because that it is the best assumption and that will impact project ranking." Van der Veer hopes that in four years' time, Shell's sluggish production will start to rise.

"I feel very good for 2010 and beyond. The problem is that short term you don't see it in our figures." Surprisingly for an oil boss, Van der Veer is not worried about the world running out of the black stuff. "There are plenty of reserves," he says. "There is a peak of easy oil like in the North Sea, but if you look at oil sands, oil shale, very deep water, we think that the peak is very far out."