By SHAI OSTER
March 2, 2007
BEIJING — Royal Dutch Shell PLC has started producing natural gas from a field in northern China that aims to help quench Beijing’s growing thirst for the fuel as it strives to reduce pollution ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Shell will spend about $600 million to $700 million to drill about 50 wells during the next seven years to develop the 1,693-square-kilometer Changbei gas field that lies mostly in Shanxi province, near its border with Inner Mongolia. The company is developing the field as part of a production-sharing contract with PetroChina Co., which owns Changbei.
China jealously guards its oil and gas industry. PetroChina, which has been ramping up domestic natural-gas production, called in foreign help to develop Changbei because of the field’s complicated geology. Shell drilled down three kilometers before branching off into two horizontal wells to release gas trapped in a 15-meter-thick layer of permeable rock.
The project, with an anticipated lifespan of 20 years, is one of the biggest joint ventures in oil and gas in China.
“The key thing is it’s a supply of gas to Beijing, which will allow Beijing to clean up,” Simon Durkin, head of Shell’s China oil-and-gas exploration and production unit, said Thursday.
After Shell has recovered its development costs at Changbei, PetroChina will eventually get about half of the gas, a clean-burning alternative to coal. Changbei is expected to produce three billion cubic meters a year, which PetroChina will distribute inside the country.
The gas will initially be piped mostly to Beijing, but will later be routed to other areas as local gas markets develop.
Terms of the contract, signed in 2005, weren’t disclosed. China’s government controls domestic fuel prices including that of natural gas, which is used for cooking, heating and power generation.
Beijing is aggressively cutting the use of highly polluting coal for power and other uses as part of efforts to improve its notoriously bad air quality before the Olympics. But demand for natural gas from a building boom has outstripped China’s supply.
Shell, which has some offshore oil production in the country with other partners, is also looking at a region in northeast China where it could develop oil shale, a rock that can yield oil after a complex distillation process.
Write to Shai Oster at [email protected]
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Royal Dutch Shell conspired directly with Hitler, financed the Nazi Party, was anti-Semitic and sold out its own Dutch Jewish employees to the Nazis. Shell had a close relationship with the Nazis during and after the reign of Sir Henri Deterding, an ardent Nazi, and the founder and decades long leader of the Royal Dutch Shell Group. His burial ceremony, which had all the trappings of a state funeral, was held at his private estate in Mecklenburg, Germany. The spectacle (photographs below) included a funeral procession led by a horse drawn funeral hearse with senior Nazis officials and senior Royal Dutch Shell directors in attendance, Nazi salutes at the graveside, swastika banners on display and wreaths and personal tributes from Adolf Hitler and Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goring. Deterding was an honored associate and supporter of Hitler and a personal friend of Goring.
Deterding was the guest of Hitler during a four day summit meeting at Berchtesgaden. Sir Henri and Hitler both had ambitions on Russian oil fields. Only an honored personal guest would be rewarded with a private four day meeting at Hitler’s mountain top retreat.
IN JULY 2007, MR BILL CAMPBELL (ABOVE, A RETIRED GROUP AUDITOR OF SHELL INTERNATIONAL SENT AN EMAIL TO EVERY UK MP AND MEMBER OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS: 
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A head-cut image of Alfred Donovan (now deceased) appears courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.
