Ben van Beurden, Shell chief executive

When Ben van Beurden told Shell senior executives last summer that the company should consider buying BG Group, the reaction, according to one insider, was: "Here we go again."

A tie-up had been mooted for the past 19 years. Dusting off the dossier had become an almost ritualistic gesture for Shell's leading dealmakers. But now the share price of the target company - the UK's third-largest oil and gas producer - was falling, dragged down by the slump in crude oil prices. And Shell had a new chief executive, determined to inject dynamism into the company. "No one was in any doubt that this time, it was serious," says the insider. "That was a lot to do with Ben."

On Wednesday Shell announced it was buying BG for £55bn including debt - the biggest global energy deal in more than a decade, and one that will define Mr Van Beurden's legacy. Acquiring BG's interests in a clutch of vast oilfields off the coast of Brazil, and its big liquefied natural gas business, will make Shell a much larger company. And this is just one part of the chief executive's ambitious plan, according to those who know him. "The supertanker has to be turned round, and he's the man to do it," says a veteran oil executive.

It will be a challenge. Created 108 years ago when Royal Dutch Petroleum combined with Shell Transport and Trading of the UK, Shell was run for decades by a cumbersome committee of directors. It gained a single chief executive in 2004, after finally unifying its British and Dutch halves in the wake of a reserves-accounting scandal. But it remained a slow-moving, conservative company, and notoriously tricky to run.

"A hundred years of consensus management is not conducive to change," says the oil executive. "They badly need simpler decision-making."

Industry experts say that if anyone can reform Shell's bureaucratic culture and brighten its financial prospects, it is Mr Van Beurden. "From a shareholder value perspective, he's the best Shell CEO I've ever seen," says one energy investment banker.

Mr Van Beurden, who has an Australian wife and four children, was born in 1958 into a "modest" Dutch background. After completing a masters in chemical engineering at Delft University of Technology, he joined Shell in 1983, working his way up and earning a name as a taskmaster. "He's blunt, he's overly demanding, he expects action in the moment," says Erik Bonino, Shell UK chairman, who worked with him in the mid-2000s. "I lost count of the number of weekend calls."

But he also imparted a "real sense of mission", Mr Bonino says. "He instilled in us [the idea] that we were building a legacy." What singled him out, former colleagues say, was his laser-like focus on profitability, unusual in a company of boffins and engineers.

That approach came to the fore when he was appointed head of chemicals in 2006. It was one of Shell's worst performing divisions. "We always had an incredibly compelling story to explain why this was so strategic, [why] Shell always needed to be in chemicals," Mr Van Beurden told the Financial Times last year. "The only flaw in that story was that we never managed to make a decent return from it."

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Mr Van Beurden says he would always ask: "What would I do if this was my business?" He adds: "Strangely enough, you come to different conclusions if you ask the questions in that way."

Colleagues praise his focus on detail. Mr Van't Hoff recalls sending Mr Van Beurden reports of 30 slides each on different parts of the business. "When you sit down with him, every page will have ink all over it - red marks, question marks, all the way down," he says. Mr Van Beurden accepts he can be a tough boss. Asked by a Dutch newspaper last year to name his vices, he said: "Maybe I'm too intense? Too stubborn? I can get obsessed with certain things".

Success at chemicals catapulted him to the top of Shell. In 2013 he was appointed director of downstream, Shell's refining and marketing division. But within a few months he had been named Mr Voser's successor.

It was a bumpy time. Shell's bet on US shale was not paying off, and it was being hit by low US gas prices and a decline in refining. When it issued a profit warning days into Mr Van Beurden's tenure, he calmed the market with a message of discipline: he would cut spending and sell assets. Insiders were impressed. "He was calmness personified," one says. "Focused, knows what he wants and what needs to be done and then sets out a plan."

That calmness came through on Wed­nesday, the biggest day of his career. Some investors worried that Shell was overpaying for BG, betting on an oil price recovery that may never happen. Mr Van Beurden has dismissed such fears: "It is bold and strategic moves that shape our industry," he said. His acquisition of BG could not be bolder.

The writer is the FT's executive news editor

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