LONDON (Reuters) - Chad Holliday, the former chairman of Bank of America and DuPont widely credited for his sustainable energy vision, will become the first American chairman at Royal Dutch Shell (L:RDSa), an oil major with tense relations with green groups.
Shell has repeatedly come under fire from environmentalists over issues such as pollution of the Niger delta river in Nigeria or its Arctic drilling campaign after the company's huge rig run aground in Alaska last year.
As chairman, Holliday will lead Shell's board through the implementation of the strategy outlined by Chief Executive Ben van Beurden, focusing mostly on boosting the company's cashflow.
An engineer by education, Holliday spent most of his career at DuPont, having joined the U.S. chemical giant in 1970 and becoming the CEO 18 years later.
It was under Holliday's 10-year leadership that DuPont established a goal of decreasing environmental footprint and turned itself from a chemical company into a science-based products and services company.
Holliday, 66, also headed the 10-member executive committee of the United Nations' and World Bank's Sustainable Energy for All initiative, launched in 2009.
"We have seven billion people on the planet but we have enough resources for about four billion," Holliday says in a video posted on the initiative's website.
"One of the most critical things people need to have to be productive is energy, so what we have is this big market opportunity to provide energy to 1.3 billion people who don't have electricity and nearly 3 billion who lack other access to energy ... and if you don't do it in a sustainable way, you won't be able to do it very well," he said. "The key thing here is that we move and start taking action and we stop just talking about it ... If we miss this, shame on us," he said.
Holliday is also chairman of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, an honorary organisation established by Congress whose members include over 2,000 of the most outstanding engineers in the United States.
"I am very much looking forward to him bringing expertise from both the industry, ideas on technology innovation and the various relationships around the world that will be a great benefit to the company," Shell's chief financial officer, Simon Henry, said on Thursday.
Holliday will take over from current chairman and former boss of Finland's Nokia (HE:NOK1V), Jorma Ollila, in 2015.
(Reporting by Dmitry Zhdannikov and Ron Bousso; Editing by Susan Fenton)