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March 20th, 2008:

Geelong Advertiser: Shell aiming to go green

Martin Watters
21Mar08
 
PUTTING BACK: Shell is planning to reduce emissions, says Greg Lewin
 
The oil giant is concentrating on developing biofuels and wind technology.

MARTIN WATTERS reports

THE future viability of Shell’s global operations lies underground, but the oil giant hopes to be putting back rather than taking out.

Shell hoped to trial new gas sequestration technology in the Otway Basin within weeks as part of $1.2 billion long-term plan to drastically reduce emissions, the company’s global research boss said yesterday. read more

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Reuters: UPDATE 1-Gunmen kill Nigerian sailor in Delta boat attack

Thu Mar 20, 2008 4:46pm EDT 

LAGOS, March 20 (Reuters) – Gunmen aboard a speedboat attacked a security vessel as it travelled to a major oil industry port in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, killing a Nigerian sailor, security sources said on Thursday.

Around 15 unknown gunmen attacked the vessel late on Wednesday as it travelled along the Bonny river towards Onne, a port used to supply oil industry contractors and ships that service the offshore sector.

“The vessel was on its way to Onne when armed men attacked,” one of the security sources, who works in the oil industry, said. Further details were not immediately available. read more

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Daily Telegraph: Russia targets UK interests with ‘spy’ arrests

Daily Telegraph Moscow image

Britain’s relations with Russian are at a low ebb

By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 6:39pm GMT 20/03/2008

The Kremlin appeared to have renewed its hostile campaign against British interests and big business in Russia today when the secret police arrested two men on espionage charges after raiding BP’s Moscow headquarters.
 
The arrests came a day after officers seized computers and documents at the offices of the energy giant’s joint Russia venture TNK-BP, raising fears among investors that the Kremlin is planning to grab one of the last sizeable oil and gas assets not under state control. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

International Herald Tribune: Russian security aims a blow at British oil company

International Herald Tribune image

An investigator leaves the headquarters of Russian-British joint venture OAO TNK-BP, Russia’s third-largest oil producer, in Moscow on Wednesday. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/The Associated Press)

By Andrew E. Kramer Published: March 20, 2008

MOSCOW: Russian security services detained an employee of BP’s Russian joint venture and are accusing that man and his brother of industrial espionage, according to a statement released Thursday by the FSB, the main successor agency to the KGB.

The arrest of the brothers bodes ill for BP’s work here and is quite likely also to send a chill through the community of Russian employees at Western companies, particularly those out of favor, as BP has been. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

UpstreamOnline: Man with a plan: presidential hopeful Barack Obama

UpstreamOnline image

Obama eyes active role in oil market

By Upstream staff

Democrat Barack Obama would take an active role in US oil markets as president, tackling concerns about the dominance of large oil companies and eyeing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a potential weapon to combat high prices, his top energy adviser said.

The presidential hopeful’s adviser, Jason Grumet, told Reuters an Obama administration would crack down on any competition lapses in the sector that have resulted from big corporate mergers and would consider releasing oil from the US strategic reserves as a way to bring down the cost of gasoline. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

UpstreamOnline: Shell reserves on a steady course

Company bucks predictions of a fall and sticks to investment plan

CHRISTOPHER HOPSON, London

Shell said its oil and gas reserves held stable in 2007 despite expectations of a drop, but told investors they may have to wait until 2010 to see production expand.

The supermajor said it had more than 50 large projects in the pipeline that would deliver stronger cash flows in the decades to come.

However, it declined to give production guidance for the year, saying only that output will increase after 2010. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

UpstreamOnline: Future vision puts renewables at core

SHELL has no plans to spin off or part sell its renewable energy businesses as rival BP is considering, and instead wants closer integration of the units with its core hydrocarbon operations, writes Christopher Hopson.

Chief executive Jeroen van der Veer said that Shell was building the green energy businesses for the long term, and dismissed concerns about the short-term value of the operations to share prices.

“It’s more basic than that… 50 years from now, we think about one third (of total energy use) will be from renewables,” he said. “You only build big businesses if you expect the profitability there.” Shell and BP are the leading investors among the international oil majors in renewable energy. Each has invested about $1 billion in the past five years. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

UpstreamOnline: Nigerian senate delays debate over Bonga overspend

DISCUSSION by the Nigerian Senate of a report concerning cost overruns at Shell’s deep-water Bonga development and other major projects has been postponed until after the Easter recess, writes Barry Morgan.

According to Senator Lee Maeba, the delay is due to protracted debates over the Nigeria Content Bill, which are expetected to continue next week.

Maeba, who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Petroleum (Upstream), said he was pressing for sanctions against operators with project costs that had become “inflated and unreasonable”, arguing key items should be set against insurance and not deemed recoverable. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

UpstreamOnline: Shell enjoying its spot in the sun

These are interesting times for large international oil companies with the enormous opportunities and elephant traps graphically on show with $100-plus per barrel oil and a share meltdown on Wall Street.

In the middle of all this was Shell chief executive Jeroen van der Veer giving his annual strategy update and highlighting the enormous and long term wealth inherent in the company’s portfolio, which is itself in a state of considerable change.

Even some of the traditional terminology is moving on to a different stage. Instead of the emphasis on “reserves” we had endless reference to “resources”. As much as there was talk of the Middle East and Russia, there were references to new “heartlands”, such as Canada and even Sweden. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

UpstreamOnline: FERC green lights Broadwater LNG project

By Upstream staff

The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has approved construction of the Broadwater Energy liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Long Island Sound, east of New York City.

The project would be able to deliver 1.25 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day to fuel electric generating plants and heat homes, helping to meet energy demand in New York and Connecticut, which share the sound, Reuters said.

The terminal is a joint venture between Shell US Gas and Power and TransCanada, and will be the first floating terminal in the US for storing and delivering LNG. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

UpstreamOnline: Safety first is lesson learned

Twenty years after the Piper Alpha platform disaster, the UK oil industy still has some way to go in cleaning up its health and safety act

TWENTY years ago Occidental Petroleum’s Piper Alpha platform exploded and caught fire, killing 167 people in the world’s worst offshore oil disaster.

The shock caused by the horrific events of 6 July 1988 left deep scars across an oil industry left reeling from the images of the fireball that engulfed the oldest and best producing oil platform in the UK North Sea. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Information on Shell Shipping

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Daily Mail: Russian police arrest BP employee and his brother for industrial espionage

Daily Mail BP logo image

The BP worker has been arrested for industrial espionage

Last updated at 16:39pm on 20th March 2008

Russian security services have arrested an employee of BP’s joint Russian venture and a second man with links to the British Council for attempted industrial espionage.

Russian news agencies reported that the two men – said to be brothers with the family name Zaslavsky and with joint US and Russian nationality – had been detained by the FSB, the successor to the KGB, for attempted industrial espionage. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

London Evening Standard: BP, Shell, RWE in Egypt tie-up

20 March 2008

Oil and gas majors BP and Royal Dutch Shell have joined German utility RWE in agreeing to spend $950 million (£475 million) on oil and gas exploration off the coast of Egypt.

Cairo is seeking to ramp up output to take advantage of soaring energy prices.
BP and RWE will explore together in two deep-water areas north of Alexandria, and promised to spend $800 million on drilling and surveying.

Shell will spend at least $45m on exploring north of Damietta, the Egyptian energy ministry says. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

The Standard (Ellesmere Port): SHELL OIL has been fined more than £260,000 for leaking a highly toxic gas.

20 March 2008

Location: CHESTER

About 20 tonnes of isobutene, a flammable and toxic gas, escaped from a corroded pipe at the Stanlow Manufacturing Complex in Ellesmere Port on May 29, 2003.

The company admitted failing to comply with health and safety at work regulations and was fined £266,681 and ordered to pay £37,131.62 costs by Judge Roger Dutton at Warrington Crown Court last week.

At a previous sentencing hearing at Chester Crown Court, Simon Parrington, prosecuting for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), said the accident, at about 11pm at the HA Alkylation Plant at Stanlow, had the “potential for loss of life.” read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: BP’s Russian Venture Is Raided by Police

Move Could Signal
Kremlin Pressure
To Cut in Gazprom
By GUY CHAZAN
March 20, 2008; Page A15

Russian police yesterday raided the Moscow offices of British oil giant BP PLC and its Russian joint venture TNK-BP Ltd., in a sign of rising Kremlin pressure on one of the largest and most-profitable foreign investments in the country.

Investigators from the Interior Ministry said they seized documents relating to a long-running criminal case against OAO Sidanko, one of the companies that was merged to form TNK-BP in 2003. Meanwhile, the ministry’s economic-crimes unit said it called in two TNK-BP employees for questioning. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Financial Times: Forbidden fields

By Roula Khalaf and Steve Negus
Published: March 20 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 20 2008 02:00

Royal Dutch Shell has been quietly working with Iraq’s oil ministry over the past two years, advising it on how to increase the production of two oilfields. Under an agreement struck after the 2003 invasion, no one from the company, Europe’s largest oil group, has set foot in the troubled country; instead, monthly face-to-face meetings with the oil ministry have been held in Amman, the Jordanian capital, and weekly contact has been maintained by video-link. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Financial Times: Police search BPand TNK-BP Russian offices

By Catherine Belton and Isabel Gorst in Moscow
Published: March 20 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 20 2008 02:00

Police yesterday searched BP’s Moscow office and those of TNK-BP, the UK oil company’s 50 per cent-owned Russian joint venture, in a move industry experts saw as a possible increase of state pressure on both companies.

TNK-BP, which is also 50 per cent owned by a group of Russian billionaires, has been the target of constant speculation that it could be the next takeover target of Gazprom, the state controlled gas group. TNK-BP’s Russian owners have denied they are seeking to sell. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

AFP: Even amid record oil prices, Niger Delta struggles with its ‘curse’

20/03/2008 05:27
AGBARHA-OTOR,

Nigeria, March 20 (AFP)

Record high oil prices have done little for the people of the oil-rich Niger Delta, where many earn a dollar a day if they can find work at all and rundown villages sit neglected.

The ramshackle houses covered in corroded metal and the abandoned fishing boats in the Delta in southern Nigeria belie the fact that the country is Africa’s biggest oil producer and the world’s eighth biggest oil exporter.

Some say oil wealth has been the Delta’s curse. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

United Press: Shell denies Iraq war oil profits

Published: March 19, 2008 at 3:27 PM

WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) — Shell has rejected accusations the increased price of oil, and thus profits, can be linked directly to the Iraq war.

In a letter to the advocacy group Consumers for Peace, the company also said it won’t transfer the so-called war profits to a special fund as the organization requested.

“The proposals in your letter are based on the contention that there is a direct causal relationship between profits achieved by some oil companies in the last few years and increases in the oil price linked to some degree to the war in Iraq,” Shell Corporate Affairs Director Roxanne Decyk wrote in the letter obtained by United Press International. “We reject this contention.” read more

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New Statesman: Beyond Metroland

New Statesman image

Owen Hatherley
Published 19 March 2008

The Shell Guides were a series of motorists’ handbooks to the British landscape that ran until the 1980s, and were edited first by John Betjeman and then by the painter John Piper. They are the focus of an exhibition at Middlesex University’s Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, which features books, posters, films and appropriate ephemera from old adverts to trilobites. To reach it, one has to get the London Underground to its most pejoratively peripheral outpost – Cockfosters, that mysterious signifier of the very end of the line. Charles Holden’s sharp, elegant hangar of a Tube station funnels you out into the suburbia so often associated with Betjeman and his brand of eccentrically conformist Englishness – plenty of mock Tudor and “stockbroker’s Georgian”; a streamline Moderne school at the end of an echoing green; the beginnings of the green belt itself. Aptly enough, there is even a startlingly shoddy block of Barratt-style flats called Betjeman Court. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

The St. Petersburg Times: Energy Milestones

Energy Milestones

September 2000: Putin promises to support foreign investors and production-sharing agreements.

May 2001: Putin replaces Gazprom CEO Rem Vyakhirev with longtime St. Petersburg ally Alexei Miller.

February 2003: TNK-BP formed through BP’s $6.75 billion investment into the joint venture with three oligarchs, the largest ever equity deal in Russia at the time.

February 2003: Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky publicly questions Putin on state-run Rosneft’s acquisition of mid-level producer Severnaya Neft. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

The Times: TNK-BP raid steps up fears over Kremlin line on foreign firms

March 20, 2008
Tony Halpin in Moscow

Police seized documents yesterday from the headquarters of TNK-BP, the Anglo-Russian oil giant, in a raid that raises new fears over Kremlin pressure on foreign investors.

Officers from the Interior Ministry searched the company’s Moscow headquarters in what a police spokeswoman described as a criminal inquiry into Sidanko Oil, a former subsidiary. Sidanko was one of the companies merged to form TNK-BP in 2003.

Staff were told over the company intercom that investigators had entered the building. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.