December 14, 2006]
Evening Standard, London, Neil Collins column
One of the rules of engineering states that things don’t fail catastrophically without warning. There’s almost always an indication of trouble ahead some time before the event. As the gruesome facts of the disaster that overtook BP’s Texas City refinery leak out like a toxic spill, it’s clear that plenty of warning signs had been ignored before the plant blew up, killing 15 people.
The harbinger of trouble can take many different forms, but here’s a strange one: a long analysis of the benefits of merging BP with Royal Dutch Shell, put together by David Cline of ABN Amro. Over 116 pages, he grinds through aspects of such an unlikely event — from synergies to regulation and divestment — concluding that none of the multitude of problems is insurmountable, and that Shell (rather than BP) is an absurdly cheap stock.