Would you charge your EV at a charging station owned by an oil giant? Well, lots of people do, every day. Of the six or seven behemoths collectively known as Big Oil, three—Shell, Total and BP—operate EV charging networks.
Shell Recharge claims to operate some 85,000 public charging points in several countries, including the US. TotalEnergies boasts a network of over 60,000 charging points in Europe. bp pulse operates thousands of public chargers in the US and Europe and—dig this—has a section on its web site that encourages people to buy EVs.
A few years ago, the companies were on a CPO buying spree. For example, Shell acquired Dutch charging station operator NewMotion In 2017, and the US firm Greenlots in 2019. (Read our 2026 feature, How the biggest US EV charging networks got their starts for more details.)
What could their motivation be? Did the oil giants mean to strangle the developing EV charging industry by buying up charging companies and shutting them down, or perhaps by ensuring that charging an EV costs more than fueling a legacy vehicle?
Well, if that’s what they meant to do, they haven’t accomplished it. By all accounts, the oil-owned charging stations work just fine, and pricing is comparable to that of other offerings. Furthermore, new charging stations are being installed at such a clip, and by so many different players, that it’s hard to imagine the oilers or anyone else cornering the market.
The opposite possibility—that Big Oil knows its days are numbered, and plans to phase out oil in favor of electrons—seems equally unbelievable. The last time we checked, these dinos were still planning production and exploration projects, and still lavishing billions of bucks on politicians around the world to speed the drilling.
But believe it or not, a gradual shift may be beginning. The three oil giants that are into EV charging (not coincidentally, these are the three that have European roots) are actually electric utilities as well.
A 2025 article in Medium explains that these three “energy companies” are no longer just oil producers, and argues that their involvement in the electric utility business is “not the clean-tech hype cycle we saw in 2020 [but] a disciplined, capital-driven reinvention led by profitability, not PR.”
Shell is building “an integrated power business that covers generation, trading, PPAs and retail.” Through Shell Energy, the firm supplies power directly to corporations and households. TotalEnergies aims to control 100–120 TWh of annual power generation by 2030. bp pulse was operating over 40,000 charge points in 2025, and aiming to have 100,000 by 2030. Medium reported that bp was selling some 1 TWh of power annually through its EV charging biz.
In the energy giants’ world, that’s small potatoes, but the volume could grow very quickly—and that potential provides a plausible (if paradoxical) pecuniary motivation for these multinationals to make a serious go of their EV charging ventures.
We haven’t heard that ExxonMobil or Chevron have dabbled in the EV charging game. But as Medium reports, Shell, Total and bp are “no longer fossil dinosaurs. They are hybrid utilities—with deep commodity expertise, global origination networks, and access to low-cost capital.”
Source: Medium
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