March 12th, 2007:

Daily Trust (Abuja)
March 12, 2007
Adenlanwa Bamgboye
Lagos

Royal Dutch Shell Plc says a team of investigators has gained access to an oil spill in Nembe Creek in the Niger Delta.

The team consists of experts and engineers from the company and the Nigerian government, said a Shell spokeswoman.
 
“The investigation team has gone in to find out the cause of the spill and the extent of the damage. They’ve gained access (to the site),” she said.
 
She could not say how long the probe will take and how soon Shell can restore lost production. The leak was found on the Nembe Creek area in the Niger Delta on Sunday, forcing Shell to shut down production of 187,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. read more

US class action lawyer Michael Hausfeld was quoted at the weekend as stating: “Deutsche Telekom, Parmalat, Royal Dutch Shell, they have shown that corporate fraud is not only endemic in the US…”

The Sunday Times: Deutsche Telekom, Parmalat, Royal Dutch Shell have shown corporate fraud is not only endemic in the US

He was able to freely make this statement without fear of a libel action from Shell because Shell management did indeed engage in an outright fraud in respect of the reserves scandal. read more

12-Mar-07

Veteran Shell marketer Raoul Pinnell is retiring at the end of the month after ten years with the oil giant.

Pinnell, who is chairman of Shell Brands International, says he will return to the UK from Switzerland and concentrate on a number of non-executive roles.

Shell moved Pinnell, who was previously vice-president of global marketing and communications, to his current role three years ago when it set up Shell Brands International to oversee its global brands and trademarks (MW May 6, 2004). read more

15:01 | 12/ 03/ 2007 

MOSCOW, March 12 (RIA Novosti) – Moscow Region prosecutors denied they were questioning an environmental regulator Monday.

A spokesperson for the environmental watchdog said earlier Monday that regional prosecutors were questioning Oleg Mitvol, the deputy head of the Federal Service for the Oversight of Natural Resources, as part of a slander suit filed by Moscow Region Governor Boris Gromov.

“Mitvol has neither been questioned nor summoned to the Moscow Region Prosecutor’s Office or district offices in the region,” the press service of the regional prosecutor’s office said. read more

EXTRACT: “…six months ago most observers would have been shocked at the extent of the concessions wrung from the foreign consortium operating Sakhalin-2. Nor has there been much of a downside for Russia as a result of this behaviour: Shell’s bruising experience seems not to have deterred others from seeking greater exposure to the energy sector, as ConocoPhillips’ recent bid to participate in the Shtokman project with Gazprom demonstrates. In this climate, it should not be a surprise if sooner or later one foreign company with a coveted asset loses everything. BP must hope that day has not yet arrived. read more

12 March 2007 (Reuters)

Turkish companies and Royal Dutch Shell have set up a consortium to bid for a gas production licence in Iraq and build a pipeline to Turkey’s energy hub of Ceyhan, an industry source said on Friday.

“There is a joint venture that has been set up to that end among TPAO (state-owned Turkish Petroleum Inc), Shell, (state pipeline operator) Botas and (Turkish firm) Tekfen,” the source told Reuters at an energy conference in Istanbul.

The pipeline would run parallel to an existing oil pipeline from Iraq’s Kirkuk to Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. read more

BY Prof. John Pepper Clark, Vanguard (Nigeria): EXTRACT FROM ARTICLE

Shell, the principal player, for instance, in its deliberate policy of divide-and-rule, continues to prowl the Niger-Delta, waving wads of memoranda of understanding as meaningless as the treaties that the Royal Niger Company earlier signed with the people.

Natives of such places as Letugbene, Agoro and Agge, often cannot follow the legalese of the small print where the clauses that matter are embedded. At the same time, Shell in the same Ekeremo Local Government Area, refuses to sign an MOU with the entire community whose capital is Amatu, the ancient settlement on the overside of Letugbene, where the River Dodo, a principal distributary of the Niger, enters the Atlantic Ocean. read more

EXTRACT: Take the recent Rossport crisis, where the Government found it could not exert leverage over Shell. Why? Because they had given everything away to Shell.”

THE ARTICLE

Kitty Holland,
Published: Mar 12, 2007

Discontent and alienation in society are not being represented by mainstream political parties, a conference of left-wing groups was told in Dublin at the weekend. Marxism 2007 was held over three days, and heard calls for alternative approaches to bringing about change in society. read more

Published: March 11 2007 19:05 | Last updated: March 11 2007 19:05

Jeroen Van der Veer, Royal Dutch Shell’s chief executive, likes to talk about how he is building a “new energy infrastructure”.

To take a cynical view, that is fancy talk for investing a huge amount in high-cost sources of oil, and trusting that the market will be strong enough for it to pay off. Shell invested $23bn last year; a larger sum than that spent by ExxonMobil, which produced more than 20 per cent more oil and gas. Much of that was not in traditional projects, drilling wells and letting the oil flow out of the ground, but in Canada’s oil sands, liquefied natural gas – where Shell is the leading international oil company – and converting natural gas to liquid road fuel. read more

By Carola Hoyos
Published: March 11 2007 19:05 | Last updated: March 11 2007 19:05

Even those who only follow the oil industry casually, will know the above reference is steeped in history.

Coined by an angry Enrico Mattei, founder of Italy’s energy group Eni, after World War II, the “Seven Sisters” were: Standard Oil of New Jersey, Royal Dutch Shell, Anglo Persian Oil Company, Standard Oil of New York, Standard Oil of California, Gulf Oil and Texaco. Together, they controlled the vast majority of the world’s oil production and refining at the birth of the modern oil age.* read more

By Carola Hoyos
Published: March 11 2007 19:05 | Last updated: March 11 2007 19:05

Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s president, this year signed a law that allows Pdvsa to seize control of the $30bn Orinoco Belt heavy crude oil projects from a handful of the world’s biggest international energy groups. By doing so he accelerated the speed with which he has turned Pdvsa from a foreigner-friendly national oil company of competent technocrats into a pawn of his nationalist agenda.

Though in technical and managerial terms it is a shell of a company, Pdvsa is still hugely influential, not least to the fortunes of international oil groups such as Repsol of Spain, ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil of the US and Total of France, to name but a few. read more

Financial Times: Petronas

Published: March 11 2007 19:05 | Last updated: March 11 2007 19:05

Petronas, Malaysia’s national oil company, has been described as the role model that other NOCs would like to follow. Solidly placed in the second division of oil companies worldwide, it is one of the top three exporters of liquefied natural gas, which has been one of the fastest-growing energy markets of the decade.

However, it has yet to realise its full potential. For a while, it looked as though Petronas would exploit that strength to build a global position to match the grandeur of its headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, once – by some standards – the world’s tallest building. In 2003 it spent $1.74bn on assets in Egypt, and appeared to be on the verge of a determined move to break out of Asia and into the American and European markets. read more

By Ed Crooks
Published: March 11 2007 19:05 | Last updated: March 11 2007 19:05

When PetroChina last year became the world’s third-biggest listed energy company by market value, it was a stark illustration of how the world energy order had changed. A company from an emerging economy that is a significant net importer of oil has emerged to challenge ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell and BP.

All three of China’s leading oil companies have been making ambitious international moves. CNOOC, the offshore oil company, caused uproar in 2005 when it bid for Unocal of the US. Sinopec, which has traditionally been stronger in downstream activities, created almost as much interest when it joined of a consortium that bid $2.2bn for exploration licences off the coast of Angola, one of the world’s most important sources of new oil supplies. But China National Petroleum Corporation, with its 88 per cent owned listed subsidiary PetroChina, is bigger than either of them, and has a wider international reach. read more

Published: March 11 2007 19:05 | Last updated: March 11 2007 19:05

BP’s reputation has plunged in the past two years as a result of a string of problems in the US. Those included investigations of its oil and gas trading activities, oil leaks in Alaska caused by pipeline corrosion, long delays in Thunder Horse, one of its most ambitious projects, and above all the explosion at its Texas City refinery in 2005 that killed 15 people.

The investigations and law suits that followed those deaths, in what was the worst industrial accident in the US for a decade, hang over the company, and will continue to do so for a long time to come. read more

By Carola Hoyos
Published: March 12 2007 02:00 | Last updated: March 12 2007 02:00

When an angry Enrico Mattei coined the phrase “the seven sisters” to describe the Anglo-Saxon companies that controlled the Middle East’s oil after the second world war, the founder of Italy’s modern energy industry could not have imagined the profound shift in power that would occur barely half a century later.

As oil prices have trebled over the past four years, a new group of oil and gas companies has risen to prominence. They have consolidated their power as aggressive resource holders and seekers and pushed the world’s biggest listed energy groups, which emerged out of the original seven sisters – ExxonMobil and Chevron of the US and Europe’s BP and Royal Dutch Shell – on to the sidelines and into an existential crisis. read more

Published: March 12 2007 02:00 | Last updated: March 12 2007 02:00

With 25 per cent of the world’s oil reserves and the capacity to produce nearly triple the amount of any other group, Saudi Aramco is the world’s most successful national oil company. The House of Saud dictates energy policy but leaves day-to-day strategy to the capable technocrats who run it.

Saudi Aramco is investing $50bn (£26bn, €38bn) over 15-20 years but its biggest fields are ageing.

Gazprom

No other company keeps Europe, and increasingly Asia, on tenterhooks more than Gazprom. As a tool of the Kremlin, it has been involved in a gas dispute with Ukraine and a debate with Japan and China over competing pipelines from Siberia as well as the grab of Royal Dutch Shell’s majority stake in the Sakhalin II liquefied natural gas project. read more

Mon Mar 12, 2007 4:56 AM BST

HOUSTON, March 11 (Reuters) – Shell Oil Co.’s (RDSa.L: Quote, Profile , Research) 156,000 barrel per day (bpd) San Francisco Bay-area refinery in Martinez was “not at normal operations” on Sunday night as the plant struggles to restart boilers shut since Friday, a refinery spokesman said.

Those carbon monoxide boilers that are closed supply steam to the refinery’s gasoline-producing 73,000 bpd fluidic catalytic cracking (FCC) unit along with other units, said spokesman Steve Lesher. read more