February 25th, 2008:

Posted : Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:05:38 GMT
Author : Shell Oil Company 
Category : PressRelease 
 
HOUSTON, Feb. 25 /PRNewswire/ — Motiva Enterprises LLC (Motiva), the company that refines and markets gasoline in the eastern and southern United States, today announced that Quik Way Retail Associates II, Ltd. (Quik Way Retail Associates), will acquire Motiva’s interest in 86 Shell-branded stations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Quik Way Retail Associates will lease 27 of these locations to 7-Eleven, Inc., and the convenience stores at these locations will be re-branded to the 7-Eleven(R) brand. All 86 sites, including those leased to 7-Eleven, will continue to sell gasoline under the Shell brand. read more

Daily Champion (Lagos)
25 February 2008
Anthony Omoh

In an effort to boost the discharge of their duties and ensure speedy services, Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company has donated modern equipment to the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS).

This is coming just as the command confirmed and decried the spate of duplicate records from most applicants for the new machine readable passport also known as e-passport.
 
Receiving the equipment at the conference centre of the Lagos Command Headquarters, the Comptroller, Mr. Ayotunde Oredipe, appreciated the assistance from the company stating that the modern working tools will help the command in discharging its activities better and faster. read more

Google was the most recently-established brand in the top 50

Monday, 25 February 2008, 01:08 GMT  

Internet giant Google has been rated the number one brand in the UK, according to a survey.

The firm came top of the UK’s top 500 brands, in an annual survey conducted by research firm Superbrands and based on the views of 1,500 professionals.

Google, which replaced the BBC in the top spot, is the only firm in the top 50 to have been established after 1990.

Microsoft ranked second, followed by BP and the BBC. The list aims to establish which brands have the best reputation. read more

February 25, 2008
By Jack Yetiv: Bio & more articles

‘Where goeth the price of oil?’ is perhaps the most popular topic these days both at cocktail parties and on the business news channels—especially after last week’s record run above $101. This makes sense given the fact that just about every American is impacted by the price of oil, one way or another.

Although much ink (a fair bit of it virtual “ink”) has been spilt on this topic, the amount of disagreement on this issue remains substantial. Although nobody can predict the price of oil with great certainty, some aspects of the oil market have become clear in the past few months, giving me a fair degree of confidence in what I am about to say here. My goal here is to focus as much on where oil prices WON’T go as on where oil IS likely to be in 6 months, one year and several years down the line. read more

Posted February 25, 2008 | 06:15 AM (EST)

By Raymond J. Learsy

Earlier this month, Royal Dutch Shell, coming off the most rapacious quarter in its history with a 60% increase in earnings to $8.47 billion spurred on in large measure on by OPEC induced crude oil prices, announced that it had successfully obtained the drilling rights to 275 lease blocks in the Chukchi Sea offshore northwest Alaska. These new  lease holdings together with Shell’s lease holdings in the Beaufort Sea moved David Lawrence, Shell’s Executive Vice President Exploration to triumphantly exclaim they have the “potential of becoming a new heartland for Shell”. read more

By Ron Derby

Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) — Oando Plc, Nigeria’s biggest retailer of petroleum products, said it will pay $625.7 million for Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production’s 49.8 percent stake in offshore licenses 125 and 134.

Oando confirmed the transaction in a statement distributed by the Stock Exchange News Service in Johannesburg today.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ron Derby in Johannesburg at [email protected]

Last Updated: February 25, 2008 05:06 EST

Simon Bowers
Monday February 25 2008

The Office of Fair Trading imposed a £116m fine on a number of supermarket groups and dairy companies, including Asda, Sainsbury and Dairy Crest.

Sainsbury’s fine was £40m but that was reduced to £26m because of the company’s co-operation with investigators.

September 2007: Southern Water was hit with a £20.3m penalty – Ofwat’s biggest ever – for misreporting and poor service over several years. The Serious Fraud Office dropped an investigation into Southern Water in April after finding insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. read more

Mon Feb 25, 2008 5:55am EST

BEIJING (Reuters) – PetroChina, China’s largest oil firm, aborted its bid for an offshore oil block in Nigeria offered by Royal Dutch Shell a few months after offshore specialist CNOOC withdrew its bid for the block, an industry source said on Monday.

Both companies were told their bids, at around $300 million to $400 million, were too low for Shell’s nearly 50 percent stake in block OML 125, the Beijing-based source familiar with the matter told Reuters. read more

By Upstream staff

UK energy company Centrica is set to offer up to $600 million for a clutch of North Sea gas fields owned by Shell and ExxonMobil, according to reports in the UK media.

Centrica was thought to be particularly interested in the Nogat fields, which were put up for sale last year, Reuters quoted the Sunday Times newspaper as saying in a report.

The newspaper said Centrica planned to spend at least $1.97 billion a year over the next few years buying gas fields to supply its customers.

A spokesman for Centrica said the group may well look at the North Sea assets, as they would with any other opportunity, but it was too early to say whether they would pursue it any further. read more

Volume: 25, No. 8 February 25 – March 2, 2008

HOUSTON:

Rajendra Pachauri said he thought he was “walking into the lion’s den” when he told oil executives they need to take a lead in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in order to save the earth.

Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore, said the oil industry has been both lion and lamb when it comes to seeing the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global warming. read more

Volume: 25, No. 8 February 25 – March 2, 2008

LONDON:

The world’s three largest fully publicly traded oil firms are investing billions of dollars more, but there is little sign yet the extra spending is leading to higher production.

Exxon Mobil Corp, Royal Dutch Shell and BP posted falling 2007 output, even though they upped capital spending to over $60 billion and some expect a further rise this year.

The drop reflects the way higher oil prices reduce the amount of oil companies get under production-sharing agreements with governments, and declining supply from ageing fields in some regions like the North Sea. read more

Brian Harkin for The New York Times
Jim Albert, front, and Jerry Tuttle, General Electric wind technicians, perch atop a turbine in Sweetwater, Tex. The turbines stand as high as 20-story buildings.

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: February 23, 2008

SWEETWATER, Tex. — The wind turbines that recently went up on Louis Brooks’s ranch are twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades that span as wide as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. More important from his point of view, he is paid $500 a month apiece to permit 78 of them on his land, with 76 more on the way. read more

EXTRACTS: If you or I paid a known murderer to go and rob somebody for us, we’d go to prison. But if a corporation does it on a massive scale, there is no punishment. This is almost invariably the case with corporate human rights abuses: Union Carbide has paid no price for killing 5,000 people in Bhopal, Shell has paid no price for its role in the decimation of the Niger Delta, and on, and on. If corporate criminals are not charged and jailed, they will carry on committing crimes against humanity. read more

Written by Omoh Gabriel & Hector Igbikiowubo    
Monday, 25 February 2008 

THERE are indications that the Nigerian economy lost a colossal $45.49 billion (about N5.3 trillion based on current exchange rate of N117) in the last three years, 2005, 2006 and 2007 owing to shut-in crude oil production in the troubled Niger-Delta, more money than is actually required to provide infrastructure development for the area.

The lost revenue in the three-year period is almost the equivalent of the N5.137 trillion the Federal Government received as its share from the federation account between 1999 and 2005, representing 45.9 per cent of the total allocation from the federation account. read more