Business Week: Open Season On Big Oil
An angry public wants quick relief from high prices. Here’s why none is in sight: “Even promising projects are becoming harder to pull off — a reality underlined this summer when Royal Dutch/Shell estimated that its Sakhalin II gas project in Russia would wind up costing $20 billion, double earlier forecasts.”
Monday 19 Sept 2005
John Browne, the chief executive of BP PLC (BP), the largest producer of oil and gas in the U.S., is already spending $14.5 billion this year on exploration and production and other capital projects, and he would like to do even more. “Could we expand our investment upstream?” he says in an interview in his office overlooking London’s St. James’s Square. “The answer is we have plenty of opportunities to do that. But we can’t find the rigs, the service contracting, all the things we need to get it done.”