Shell Ventures veteran Van de Wouw joins climate investment firm

The former head of Shell Ventures, Shell’s corporate VC arm, Geert van de Wouw has joined Just Climate, a climate-focused investment firm, as head of portfolio management and value creation.

He had been managing partner of Shell Ventures since 2012, during which time his focus areas generally overlapped with the energy transition-related investments that he’ll be looking at for Just Climate.

The new role, he said in a LinkedIn post, came after what he described as hundreds of coffee meetings with people who helped him think about his next move.

“While solar and wind are well on their way to becoming mainstream energy sources, the next wave of climate innovations brings its own unique challenges. These solutions often require complex process- and manufacturing infrastructure and target sectors such as steel, cement, chemicals, fuels, and agriculture —where electrification is only part of the journey to net-zero. Investing in these must-abate sectors demands more than capital,” he said.

After he left in late 2024, he told GCV he would be interested in moving into late-stage investment, helping technology get over the line into real impact.

“Being an enabler of that transition and helping accelerate it has been hugely rewarding for me over the last 12 years,” he said at the time

“I think we are reaching the point [in the green transition] where [cleantech technologies] need to be scaled to size. The time of experimentation is behind us.”

Before joining Shell Ventures, van de Wouw spent nearly eight years in the oil and gas major, working in business development and as general manager for enterprise sellers, before spending a year setting up a joint venture between Shell and China National Petroleum Corporation.

He also spent just over a decade at engineering company Fluor as a process engineer and then head of new business development.