June 4th, 2007:

Terry Macalister
Tuesday June 5, 2007

Vladimir Putin turned up the pressure on Britain’s biggest company yesterday saying it was intolerable that BP and its local partners were “doing nothing” to meet their obligations by fully developing Kovykta, a huge gas field in Siberia.

The president’s words will increase fears within BP that the state could try to effectively take over its Russian business by buying up a half share in the TNK-BP joint venture.

“I would like to stress that the [Kovykta] field has reserves of three trillion cubic metres. To understand its importance for our country, it is equal to almost all reserves of Canada,” said Mr Putin in an interview posted on his website, www.kremlin.ru. “But if members of the consortium are doing nothing to meet licence obligations, how much longer do we have to tolerate this?” read more

MARK WILLIAMSON
June 05 2007

Vladimir Putin waded into the row about the $20bn (£10bn) Kovykta gas field, saying he had lost patience with BP and its partners, heightening fears the big oil and gas company could lose at least part of its investment.

Following threats by Russian regulators to revoke the licence for the Siberian field, the Russian president pinned the blame for alleged delays in getting production from Kovykta up to speed squarely on shareholders in the TNK-BP venture.

“If the members of the consortium are doing nothing to meet licence obligations, how much longer do we have to tolerate this?” he told western reporters. read more

06.04.07
 
PARIS (Thomson Financial) – Total, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil unit Esso and Total division Elf are all to appear in court on Sept 25 charged with dangerous storage and handling of kerosene fuel at Nice Airport in southern France, legal sources told Agence France-Presse.

According to the public prosecutor, the companies have kept some of their fuel in storage trucks on the airport’s tarmac, in view of a lack of capacity at the airport’s storage facilities.

The local chamber of commerce is also being prosecuted for allegedly allowing this situation to occur. read more

ARANEE JAIIMSIN
4 June 2007

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, a worldwide group of oil, gas and petrochemical companies, is looking to buy petrol stations in Thailand after failing to acquire Conoco’s Jet retail businesses. Acquiring new stations would expand Shell’s distribution network in a country where the retail margins are low, said Rob Routs, Shell’s executive director of oil products and chemicals.

”We need high sales volume in the markets where the margin is low,” said Mr Routs. read more

June 4, 2007 

When I was only eleven years old, growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, I knew instinctively that I would have a career in the petroleum industry as a geologist. I know that sounds a bit strange but it turned out that way. I enjoyed hard rock geology and mineralogy. However, even Frank Beales’ droning on in his lectures about “clean washed sandstones” never discouraged me from getting into the oil biz. Ruth and I were married in my fourth year at University of Toronto and upon graduation I chose a job as exploitation engineer with Shell. My interests were always on the technical side of the business and Shell was very much focused upon applied technology. read more

Mon Jun 4, 2007 5:55 PM BST

MADRID, June 4 (Reuters) – A multibillion dollar gas-to-liquid fuel plant being built in Qatar by Royal Dutch Shell should be operational by the end of 2009, Qatar’s energy minister said on Monday. “We are on schedule and hopefully at the end of 2009 it will be operational,” Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah told Reuters, after a meeting with Spanish Industry Minister Joan Clos.

Shell’s Pearl GTL project will dwarf a Sasol plant in Qatar which has run into technical problems. read more

06/04/2007
by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer

The price of gasoline is certainly one of the biggest issues facing both the United States and the world. According to Shell Oil President John Hofmeister, the current $3 a gallon gas price can be directly attributed to two things: America’s dependency on foreign oil and the federal government’s refusal to let oil companies tap into the vast crude oil reserves below ground in the continental U.S. and in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hofmeister was the guest speaker at Friday’s Quarterly Cornerstone luncheon at the Hyatt and gave the full room an overview of both the current state of the oil industry and its future outlook. read more

(Fed up: Putin said Russia has lost patience with BP and others over Kovykta field)

By Upstream staff

Russia has run out of patience with Russian billionaires and oil major BP over their repeated delays in bringing the giant Kovykta gas field on stream, President Vladimir Putin said today.

“I would like to stress that the field has reserves of 3 trillion cubic metres. To understand its importance for our country it is equal to almost all reserves of Canada,” Putin said in an interview. read more

By Tommy Denton

Once upon a time, the British crown so frowned upon certain aspirations among its colonists in America that the Redcoats waged an unsuccessful war to quell the usurpations.

For the Americans, what began as a tea party finished in the birth of a new nation, the sovereign people determined to be masters of their own destiny.

About 125 years later, in 1901, the British crown agreed to help relieve the indebtedness of Mozzafar al-Din Shah Qajar, then shah of Iran, by “accepting” a 60-year concession to develop Iranian oil fields. Englishman William Knox D’Arcy struck the first commercially important reserve in 1908, later transferring controlling interest to what became the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. in 1909. read more

Published: Jun 04, 2007

Energy multinational is likely to lose out to the state in battle for control of Siberian gas field, writes Conor Sweeney in Moscow

BP has won a reprieve in its battle to retain control of a vast Siberian gas field, valued at 16 billion, despite expectations that it would lose its licence last week.

The latest twist in the increasingly precarious control of the TNK-BP consortium over the Kovytka gas field comes just months after another oil major, Shell, reluctantly agreed to cede control of the vast Sakhalin Island energy project. read more

Published: Jun 04, 2007

Madam, – I would like to congratulate you on your leader article in today’s paper (May 30th) urging a balanced view of Hugo Chavez’s rule in Venezuela. In recent times, all the media coverage has been uniformly negative and I suspect that this is prompted by multinational oil companies and banks.

As you point out, removal of checks and balances is grounds for concern but, in terms of the bigger picture, it is refreshing seeing a leader more concerned about his people than corporations. I wonder what he would do about the “Shell to Sea” standoff? – read more

EXTRACT: Unilever is among the big multinational schemes that have already carried out pooling. Shell and Nestlé are also believed to be looking at it.

By Kalpana Fitzpatrick
Published: June 4 2007 03:00 | Last updated: June 4 2007 03:00

Cross-border pension pooling has been a hot topic for a couple of years but only a few schemes have so far taken the plunge.

The concept of cross-border pooling, which involves combining the assets into a single collective investment fund or pension fund, is still in its infancy and there appears to be a lack of understanding and a great deal of complexity attached to it. read more

Published: 04/06/2007 12:00 AM (UAE)
Reuters

London: A frostier climate for private investors in Russia, holder of the world’s largest natural gas reserves, is likely to stop oil firms from pressing ahead with new projects there.

BP’s Russian venture is facing the loss of the licence for the Kovykta gas field. The move follows Kremlin pressure on projects involving companies like Royal Dutch Shell and Total.

“The big oil companies haven’t been doing much new in Russia, they have been seeking to hang on to what they’ve already got rather than signing new deals,” said Julian Lee, analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies. read more

By Lucian Kim

June 4 (Bloomberg) — Four corporate heavyweights are arrayed before Russian President Vladimir Putin in his Kremlin office. Sitting across a white oval table from Putin are Shoei Utsuda and Yorihiko Kojima, chief executive officers of Japan’s largest trading companies, Mitsui & Co. and Mitsubishi Corp.; Jeroen van der Veer, head of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s biggest oil producer; and Putin’s old friend, OAO Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller. The purpose of the Dec. 21, 2006, confab: to seal a deal made earlier that day in which Gazprom, the giant state-run gas company, will take control of Sakhalin-2, a $22 billion oil and gas project on Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East. read more

June 3, 2007 6:03 p.m.

Excerpts from an interview Russian President Putin gave a small group of G-8 journalists on June 1, 2007.

On Shell and BP investments in Russian energy:

[Shell’s contract on Sakhalin] was a colonial agreement. It had nothing in common with the interests of the Russian Federation. I regret that at the start of the 1990s, Russian officials allowed themselves to sign up to this, something they should in fact have been jailed for. According to this agreement, we allowed others to exploit our natural resources for an extended period but got nothing in return — almost nothing. read more

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Oil prices ebbed on Monday after three days of gains as a major U.S. gasoline pipeline resumed pumping and some Nigerian militants called a one-month truce, although analysts saw little to suggest an end to 18 months of violence.

London Brent crude, current seen as a better gauge of global oil markets, fell 31 cents to $68.76. U.S. light, sweet crude fell 40 cents to $64.68 a barrel by 0143 GMT, ending a three-day rally that was capped by a $1 surge on Friday.

U.S. Colonial Pipeline Co. said on Sunday that it had restarted a gasoline line from Atlanta to North Carolina that had shut last Tuesday due to a leak. Delays to resuming operations on the line had spurred buying on Friday. read more

EXTRACT: Generally, anti-Western sentiment is on the rise and the campaign against companies such as BP and Shell has much to do with the government’s desire to reclaim control of foreign-owned oil fields.

By Adrian Blomfield
Last Updated: 3:08am BST 04/06/2007

A campaign of intimidation is threatening the future of Britain’s cultural wing in Russia. The British Council has been accused by Russian authorities of a range of crimes from tax irregularities to turning young people into “British agents of influence”. read more

EXTRACT: Russian pressure on oil contracts came because Shell had struck a “colonial” agreement with Moscow while BP, with its Russian partner TNK, had not met its commitments.

June 4, 2007

Western leaders should listen to Putin and tell him where he is wrong

A year ago a commanding President Putin hosted the first G8 summit held in Russia. This week, as he heads to another gathering of the world’s leading industrial powers, he will find a far cooler reception.

Russia’s behaviour over the past year has irritated and alarmed Western partners: the bullying of Georgia and Estonia; the pressure put on Western investors, especially energy companies, to alter contracts; the unrelenting crackdown on the media, opposition groups and nongovernmental organisations; the challenge to Washington over Iraq, Iran and missile deployments in Eastern Europe; and the refusal to extradite the main suspect in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko to Britain. All this has exacerbated worsening East-West relations, which are suffering from a Big Chill, if not a Cold War. read more

EXTRACT: He also gave no quarter on the cases of Shell and BP, the British oil giants, who have recently seen the terms of their investments in Russia rewritten because of alleged breaches of their licences.

THE ARTICLE

June 4, 2007
Bronwen Maddox in Moscow

President Putin has warned the US that its deployment of a new anti-missile network across Eastern Europe would prompt Russia to point its own missiles at European targets and could trigger nuclear war.

In an exclusive interview with The Times, the Russian leader says: “It is obvious that if part of the strategic nuclear potential of the US is located in Europe and will be threatening us, we will have to respond. read more

EXTRACT: …Mr Putin also said, in effect, that he had been looking for a reason to revoke the exploration licence originally granted to Shell. “Did you see the initial agreement?” he asked. “It was a colonial agreement that had nothing in the interests of the Russian Federation. A real zero.” He added that “if our partners [Shell] had honoured their commitments then we would have had no chance of remedying the situation but it was their fault that they violated our environmental legislation.” read more

From Ahamefula Ogbu in Port Harcourt, 06.04.2007
 
A High Court sitting in Port Harcourt, Rivers State has ordered Shell Petroleum Development Company to forfeit its occupancy of their residential area on Aba Road covering 153.5 acres or in the alternative, pay N6.1 billion to Rumuokroshe people of Obio/Akpor Local Government area of the State.

The order of the court followed the challenge of SPDC by Ojiowhor Monday Amadi and 13 others suing on behalf of Rumuecheta-Mgbuesilari family of Rumukoroshe and Chief Luke Ihunwo and 14 other as well as Chief Emmanuel Azubuike and two others of the same village as co-claimants where they alleged that the oil giant surreptitiously took over their land without their consent. read more