January 3rd, 2008:

By John Donovan

The information below was published on the Shell sww Intranet today, apparently in response to the recent massive global publicity generated by leaks to this website about Shell’s job cutting plans. We are indebted to the Shell insider who kindly supplied it to us.

It contains a comment by Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer as part of an attempt to reassure Shell employees after the genuine concern expressed by Shell staff here and on other online forums in the last few days about the planned outsourcing of thousands of jobs.   read more

Why Schlumberger, long a hired gun in oil-field services, is becoming a major force and scaring Big Oil

By Stanley Reed
January 3, 2008

Pad 1b Lempyskoye is a pretty desolate spot. The drilling site for Russian oil giant Rosneft isn’t much more than a snow-covered clearing in the endless evergreen-and-birch forest 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow. Its 37 staffers live in spartan trailers, and the lavatory is a rank hole in the ground beneath a metal shack. In the winter, temperatures drop to 40F or lower, and in the spring the whole area thaws into a mosquito-infested swamp. As a drilling rig bores well after well deep into the frozen Siberian earth, it is wrapped in green tarpaulin to protect workers from the wind and cold. read more

Thu Jan 3, 2008 10:50am GMT
By Alex Lawler

LONDON (Reuters) – Oil prices, which on Wednesday hit $100 a barrel for the first time, will probably go up further in the next five years unless economic growth falters and slows fuel demand.

Falling production in some areas outside OPEC, robust growth in demand led by countries such as China and a strain on oil refineries to make fuels from crude are likely to extend a rally that began in 2002.

“Oil could rise further from here,” said Kris Voorspools, analyst at Fortis in Brussels. “It’s simple supply and demand fundamentals.” read more

Author: John-Paul Kamath
Posted: 08:26 03 Jan 2008

Royal Dutch Shell is to outsource 3,000 IT jobs worldwide as part of a wider plan to save £250m.

The oil company has 3,200 staff in IT functions globally, comprising both contractors and employees. Approximately 3,000 of those positions will be outsourced, and 10% of those will be from the UK.

In December 2005, Shell launched a review into outsourcing part of its global IT business, and it expects an outsourcing deal to be finalised by mid 2008, said a spokeswoman. read more

03 January, 2008 12:00:00 EJIOFOR ALIKE

The trellines, which are bonded hoses made of rubber, steel rings, and reinforced rubber layers that allow the hose to withstand internal pressure, were installed without any impact on oil production during the entire installation process.

SBM was contracted by Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company (SNEPCO) for the supply and installation of a trelline flexible export line for the Bonga field offshore.

The line, with a total length of over 2,000 metres and a 20-inch diameter, is suspended between the spread moored Floating Production Storage Offshore (FPSO) and the export buoy at a depth of about 100 metres under the water surface. read more

January 3rd, 2008 05:46

This is the third attempt to outsource the core IT function of Shell in the past 15 years. I worked in that division for 25 years and the first two attempts to do this, back in the 1990’s were both abandoned for good reasons – outsourcing results in short term savings (usually due to initial subsidies provided by the contractor) but in the long term costs escalate. In my experience outsourcing companies cannot create savings large enough to pay for the profits they need to take, and they are very skilful at slowly raising their charges after they have won the contract. Outsourcing also results in lower flexibility of the IT division to help the business develop. As IT is now (wrongly) seen by Shell as a commodity this argument no longer stands. Sadly Shell has always been trailing edge as far as using IT goes, not because of the quality of the IT staff but because of the quality of business management, who in my time tried to stamp out the use of email and ridiculed the Internet as a toy that adolescents play games on. read more

Local – 3 January 2008, 7:24 AM

SANTO DOMINGO. – Accounts Chamber president Andrés Terrero yesterday said the infractions of altered invoices detected in the audit on the Dominican Petroleum Refinery (Refidomsa) include three specific cases with frauds of more than RD$17 million.

The official said 11 other cases of altered invoices were uncovered which the auditors couldn’t quantify, as they didn’t receive the complete information requested from those shipments’ suppliers.

Terrero said the Accounts Chamber resolution 6-07 the sent to the Corruption Prevention Department (DPC) makes reference only to an alteration of RD$771,814, though the report explains the other alterations in detail. read more

03.01.2008 13:25

The Dutch-British energy group Shell will be outsourcing large parts of its IT infrastructure. The enterprise confirmed today, Wednesday, that negotiations are ongoing with the German firm T-Systems and two US candidates, EDS and AT&T. The obvious plan is to split the order into three parts. While T-Systems (a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary) is in the race for the storage and computing centres, EDS could get the contract for customer care and AT&T could be awarded the network operations. read more

The Associated Press
Thursday, January 3, 2008

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: Europe’s current target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 can be reached, but raising it would be a mistake, the head of Royal Dutch Shell PLC said in an interview published Thursday.

Jeroen Van der Veer, chief executive of Europe’s largest oil company, said a goal of 20 percent reduction in Europe from 1990 levels can be achieved.

“If the technology and research develop, then you can make an evolutionary step like that in 10-20 years,” he said. read more

The world’s largest corporations are getting even richer

© Camille Switzerland3rd January 2008

Bumper oil prices and an increasing number of mergers and acquisitions meant another year of record revenues for the world’s largest corporations. But which firms are the most profitable? We take a look at the top 10.

According to a survey by business magazine Fortune, US oil giant Exxon Mobil is the world’s most profitable company. In 2006, Exxon Mobil got even richer. The firm’s profits continued to soar thanks to bumper crude oil prices. Its earnings jumped 9.3 per cent, to a whopping $39.5bn, breaking the Fortune Global 500 record that it set the previous year with $36.1bn in profits. read more

Google translation from Dutch to English

By Wilbert de Vries, Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2008 12:56, page views: 20,373

Shell is working on plans to almost its entire IT department to spend automatiseerders.  This would be more than three thousand IT jobs in the oil at stake.

Earlier Shell had already indicated that it would save. The scale on which it now seems to be done, has surprised even its own employees.  Some of the plans have therefore be leaking, as Telegraph.co.uk reported at the end of last week.  Although there is also the finance department would be rehabilitated, it is the department hardest hit, according to the newspaper. This section would 3200 jobs at stake that may be subcontracted to automatiseerders. read more

Wednesday Jan 2, 3:26AM EST  

(RTTNews) – Anglo-Dutch oil giant Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDS-B, RDS-A, RYDAF.PK, RDSA.L) is finalizing details of its cost cutting initiatives, with an aim to surpass the threatening effects of sky-high oil prices to its profit, the Wall street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The company plans to outsource about 3,000 information-technology jobs as part of the initiatives. The company also plans few finance job cuts, reshaping expatriate packages and restructuring Nigeria ventures to reduce costs. read more

Boom Cuts U.S. Clout,
Revives Middle East;
Dark Days for Detroit
By NEIL KING JR. , CHIP CUMMINS and RUSSELL GOLD
January 3, 2008; Page A1

The surging price of oil, from just over $10 a barrel a decade ago to $100 yesterday, is altering the wealth and influence of nations and industries around the world.

These power shifts will only widen if prices keep climbing, as many analysts predict. Costly oil already is forcing sweeping changes in the airline and auto sectors. It is intensifying the politics of climate change and adding urgency to the search both for fresh sources of crude and for oil alternatives once deemed fringe.
 
The long oil-price boom is posing wrenching challenges for the world’s poorest nations, while enriching and emboldening producers in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela. Their increasing muscle has a flip side: a decline of U.S. clout in many parts of the world. read more

January 3, 2008
Patrick Hosking, Banking and Finance Editor and Steve Hawkes

The price of crude oil soared to $100 per barrel for the first time yesterday in a trend that could feed through into higher petrol prices and delay an early cut in interest rates this year.

Aggressive buying by speculators, cold weather in the northern hemisphere and the falling US dollar helped to propel the price of oil to a record on the Nymex exchange in New York.

Crude oil — the raw material for petrol, diesel and heating oil and a major component in the manufacture of plastics and packaging — is a major determinant of costs for businesses. read more

By Sheila McNulty
Published: January 3 2008 02:00 | Last updated: January 3 2008 02:00

Oil’s flirtation with the $100-a-barrel mark will heighten pressure on energy companies to reinvest profits rather than continuing to use them for share buybacks, energy experts said yesterday.

“This year, with $100 oil, is a great year for the chairmen of all the oil companies to think more creatively about how to spend their higher income flows on productive investments,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, energy expert at the James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy. “By productive investment, I mean investment on: how do I find more oil? How do I access unconventional oil? And ways to make money in alternative energy.” read more

By Javier Blas in London and Michael Mackenzie in New York
Published: January 2 2008 19:00 | Last updated: January 3 2008 00:37

Crude oil prices briefly hit the $100-a-barrel mark and gold prices jumped to an all-time high as investors poured money into commodities on Wednesday amid deepening fears about the weakness of the US dollar.

The oil price rally soured the first stock trading day of the year, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing 1.7 per cent lower, its worst start since a slide of 1.9 per cent on the first day of trading in 1983. read more