Shell Canada Limited (SCL), a leading Canadian integrated oil and gas company, is a member of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. The Group holds a 78% interest, the balance being publicly owned. SCL corporate goals are leadership in profitability, which means attaining a 15 per cent return on average capital employed, and profitable growth, with an overarching commitment to sustainable development (SD). SCL believes that a commitment to SD, by focusing on the economic, the social and the environmental dimensions supports both profitability and profitable growth over the long term. SCL has also embedded in all its activities the practices of "operational excellence." By this we mean continuously improving our performance in seven key areas of the business: profitability, customer focus, asset reliability, growth, costs, our employees, and health, safety and SD. Within SCL this is known as operational excellence and it facilitates the business managing sometimesconflicting priorities. Every one of these areas contributes directly to the corporate goals and to the three dimensions of SD.
During the 1990's, the company achieved considerable reductions in costs and made changes in its portfolio of activities. Operational excellence has allowed us to maximize opportunities presented by market conditions. Our earnings reached $1, 010 million in 2001, up from $79 million in 1992.
Over that same period, our cash flow from operations has more than tripled, and our return on capital employed last year was 21.5 per cent - a significant improvement over the equivalent 2.9 per cent of 1992.
As for profitable growth, Shell Canada is already benefiting from the production of natural gas from the Sable project, which came on stream in December 1999. Shell Canada leads the Athabasca Oil Sands project (AOSP) which is expected to reach its full capacity through 2003. Our 60 per cent share in this joint venture makes this investment the largest in the company's history and the project is the key focus of this paper. Shell Canada is also part of a consortium of companies considering natural gas development in the Mackenzie Delta, in Canada's Northwest Territories.
As with any commodity, the petroleum industry is subject to volatile market forces. But today, the range of uncertainties is even wider than hitherto.
Shell Canada's response to great uncertainty is to focus even harder on the basics. For us, sustainable development has now become one of the basics of good business. Thinking sustainably forces us to develop strategies that maintain the robustness of our business in a changing world.
Shell Canada Limited first adopted a formal sustainable development policy in 1990. But we are still learning how to integrate SD into the day-to-day business. Meeting the needs of our customers a