March 10th, 2006:

10/03/06
Oil multinational Shell has accepted a resolution to be discussed at its forthcoming Annual General Meeting following a campaign by the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility (ECCR). The campaigners are concerned about Shell's activities in Nigeria, in County Mayo, Ireland, and at Sakhalin II in Russia.
ECCR has been in dialogue with Shell about these and other issues since 1994 but feels that the time has come to highlight these issues publicly at the company's AGM.
Campaigners say that Shell's failure to adhere to standards for environmental impact assessments, to respect fundamental human rights, to consult stakeholders properly, and to address grievances has led to conflict in Nigeria. In County Mayo five local farmers were imprisoned for 94 days for preventing Shell contractors from accessing their land to construct a high-pressure gas pipeline that would run close to homes. And in Sakhalin, Shell made its decisions on project design and began implementation before gaining essential information on biodiversity and local people.
ECCR's resolution calls on Shell to achieve significant improvements in the quality of its risk analysis, social and environmental impact assessment and community consultations, and to implement rigorous policies and independent assessments when proposing untested technical solutions.
In order to submit their resolution to Shell's AGM, ECCR needed the support of 100 individual shareholders.
It has now been signed by more than 130 shareholders representing well over 600,000 shares.
Shell has informed ECCR that it has accepted the resolution and will circulate it to shareholders under the provisions of the Companies Act.
The resolution will now be presented at Shell’s Annual General Meeting 16 May 2006 and voted on by its shareholders.
“In a world where money talks, it is increasingly important that ethical shareholders make their views known to try and influence company behaviour,” said Andrew Pendleton, from Christian Aid, a partner of ECCR.
ECCR is an ecumenical organisation and it includes within its membership representatives of many mainstream Christian denominations, corporate agencies of the churches, religious communities and orders, and many interested individuals. read more

From August 25, 2005
Following his recent trip to Africa, NPR's Steve Inskeep discusses the tensions and violence rising in Nigeria as Shell Oil seeks the rights to drill there.
Nigeria in Transition – TRANSCRIPT
RAY SUAREZ: Tensions and violence have been rising in Nigeria as Shell Oil has sought the rights to drill more widely for more oil in the Niger River Delta region. NPR's Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep is back from a reporting trip in the region. He joins me now, Steve welcome.
STEVE INSKEEP: Good to be here.
RAY SUAREZ: With oil at 67 bucks a barrel, why aren't these great times for Nigeria and the oil industry there?
STEVE INSKEEP: Well, to some degree it is a good time for Nigeria and the oil industry; they're getting windfall profits. A lot of money is flowing to Nigeria; a lot of money is flowing to oil companies — not just Shell – but Chevron, Exxon/Mobile, and a number of others that are drilling there.
What makes it not such a great time is that for the last several decades violence has been building off and on in the Niger River Delta, which is a swampland area where a lot of the oil is and where we spent a lot of our reporting time over this summer, because you have a very lucrative industry, which is living right next to very, very poor people and there is been a lot of conflict over time, a lot of mistrust built up between residents and the companies.
People feel that they have been cheated; people feel that their rights have been violated; they end up protesting against the companies or in some cases attacking the companies. The companies end up — have to be protected by the military. And you end up with a very confused and deadly situation.
RAY SUAREZ: Well why hasn't that wealth coming out of the ground benefited the people of the Delta region?
STEVE INSKEEP: Well, it depends who you ask. The oil companies will say first off that they don't employ that many people, and so there are millions of people who would like a job in Nigeria; there's only tens of thousands who can work for the oil companies. That's part of the explanation; there is something to that.
Another part of the explanation is that money paid to Nigeria's government in taxes – and the Nigerian Government will admit this — a lot of the money over the years has been stolen.
Nigeria has a tremendous corruption problem, and the money that's disappeared is probably in the billions — not the millions — over the years — perhaps the tens of billions according to some people's estimates, and so you have a situation where in many parts of the oil-producing area you don't really have much of a functioning government.
There aren't any roads in many areas; there aren't good schools in many areas; many places don't even have electricity; many places don't have telephone lines, although cell phones are now spreading through independent companies.
And so you have a situation where people are aware of the outside world because the outside world is sitting right next to them; there is a giant oil terminal or an oil well there, and yet they know that they're not part of the outside world; they're not gaining from the outside world, and that leads to a great deal of frustration.
RAY SUAREZ: Not gaining but also feeling themselves burdened — don't they — by environmental concerns, fouling of the groundwater, that kind of thing?
STEVE INSKEEP: Yeah. Shell in its 2004 report – Shell is the largest producer in Nigeria, but not the only one – Shell acknowledged more than 200 oil spills last year alone. Thousands of barrels of oil were spilled in the water and there have been many oil spills over the years. And that has contributed, by many people's accounts, to environmental degradation there.
There are other problems as well. People raise concerns about that and they also raise concerns simply about dealing with the government in that area because the face of the government to many people is a police officer or a soldier or sailor who is there fundamentally to guard an oil installation and not to help the people, or protect the people.
Feelings of exclusion lead to violence
RAY SUAREZ: So there is a feeling that the government has taken sides in this triangle and it's with the companies and not with the people who live there?
STEVE INSKEEP: Yeah. It gets extraordinarily complicated. You have various ethnic groups in the Delta and tribal groups and different villages and individuals, many, many different groups, and it is often felt that the oil companies have taken sides, that they have gone about a divide and rule practice as some people will call it.
And consequently, people when they get frustrated, when there is an ethnic militia or an ethnic group that is going to engage in violence, they'll often turn it against oil companies, which they will see as perfectly justified, even though the oil companies will find it an outrageous disruption; and we as Americans experience this as a cutoff of some little slice of the oil that the United States gets from Nigeria.
We get 1.2 million barrels a day from Nigeria; it's the fifth largest supplier of oil to the United States – it's a significant amount of oil. Every day there is some more than 100,000 barrels, 140,000 from one company, as a matter of fact, that doesn't get out of Nigeria because of violence over the last couple of years and some days that's a much higher number.
RAY SUAREZ: What kind of — what forms does this violence take; who is doing what and to whom?
STEVE INSKEEP: It depends on the situation. In some cases — and there is a case history that we've reviewed, there are a number of different case histories — in some cases you simply have people who live next to an oil facility, who feel they have been cheated, who feel that they're actually worse off for the facility being there because of pollution and other problems – who feel they're not benefiting and they go and they protest.
There's a giant Chevron oil terminal called Escravos, named after the river nearby — an old Portuguese word meaning slaves — which suggests the history of the place a little bit. That terminal in 2002 and again in 2005 was invaded by residents from nearby villages who simply felt that they were not gaining anything from Chevron.
Chevron is the closest approximation to a government in this remote area; they don't see a lot of state or federal authorities other than people associated with Chevron; they don't get any benefit from the taxes that Chevron pays or they don't see any benefit from the taxes that Chevron pays and so they expect Chevron to do something for them, to provide community development or to provide jobs.
They invade the terminal; they shut it down; Chevron makes promises; people feel the promises aren't kept; they come back again. That's one way that there's violence.
There are also these ethnic conflicts; there was a major one in 2003 revolving around elections in that country. There was one group that felt that another group was having the election rigged in their favor and so they struck out. And they battled with Nigeria's military to some degree and they also attacked oil facilities because that was a way that they could strike back at the government.
There are other kinds of violence as well. We did a case history in our reporting of a couple of villages — actually tiny kingdoms, ancient kingdoms — who disputed who owned a bit of oil land.
The question who was got paid a little bit of money for the oil that was discovered on that land. They ended up fighting over it; a number of people were murdered. The military came in and essentially, by some people's account, settled matters by burning one of the villages. The military denies that the burning was intentional but, in any event, we went and visited — a great number of buildings were destroyed, a number of people were killed.
Working with the government to ease tensions
RAY SUAREZ: Well, you mentioned that there is no evidence of the government in many of these places. Does the oil company become — in effect — the government, and how do they respond to these challenges? What did they tell you about what they're trying to do in that part of Nigeria?
STEVE INSKEEP: We spoke to a Chevron executive named Chuck Taylor who said — who acknowledged we have to become the government. He acknowledged that in many people's eyes we are the government because we're the only part — we're the only thing that's visible. And it's a very remote swamp; it's very hard to move around and there is some truth to that, and so they acknowledge that they need to provide some kind of community development.
And each of the oil companies will have showcase instances in which they provided some community development. Here's a great school; here's a hospital; here are other things that we have done. There are other instances in which oil companies have to acknowledge they have made promises that haven't been kept.
They will promise, for example — in a village near the Chevron Terminal there is erosion of the land, which is blamed on the way that Chevron has managed its land. Whether that's fair or not, Chevron has promised to fix it by building some new housing on some new land. It hasn't been done yet, and Chevron has its own reasons why that hasn't been done — they'll say because the situation is too unstable and there's been too much violence.
So each company is trying to do something but the question is: Are they doing something that's just public relations or that's too small to make a regional difference in a region of millions of people, or are they really going to do something that could change the situation? And that's a very open question I think.
RAY SUAREZ: Is the series finished?
STEVE INSKEEP: No. Not quite.
RAY SUAREZ: Okay. So they can listen to the past reports at NPR.org –
STEVE INSKEEP: That's correct.
RAY SUAREZ: — and you have got some other ones coming up on Morning Edition?
STEVE INSKEEP: One more coming up on Friday.
RAY SUAREZ: Steve Inskeep, thanks.
STEVE INSKEEP: Ray, thank you. read more

By Ofeibea Quist-Arcton
Three foreign oil workers — including two Americans — are still being held hostage in Nigeria as part of a disruptive campaign against the government by militants in the volatile oil-producing Niger Delta.
The militants are sabotaging Nigerian crude oil exports in their efforts to gain more benefits for people living in the oil-rich delta. They have threatened to step up attacks.
Militants released oil worker Macon Hawkins of Texas into the hands of a group of foreign journalists last week. It was Hawkins 69th birthday. Suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure, the Shell Nigeria construction manager had been a hostage in the Niger Delta for two weeks. He had a message for Washington.
“I think the U.S. needs to keep up the pressure on the Nigerian government to pay attention to these people, and do something about their poor conditions,” Hawkins said. “Because I honestly, truly believe these people will fight till death. And there's going to be one behind every tree from now on.”
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta is behind the kidnappings. The group has warned that it will drive oil companies like Shell, Chevron and Exxon-Mobil out of the delta.
Since Nigeria started pumping oil in the 1950s, the people of the Niger Delta have been pushing for more resources and more money. Princeton Lyman, a former United States ambassador to Nigeria, and currently director of africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, describes this as an evolution of anger.
“What's happened recently is that unrest has morphed into a series of militias, and sometimes criminal gangs, who have benefited by stealing the oil and creating an outright challenge to the government,” Lyman said.
Obioku is a remote village nestling in the maze of lush mangrove creeks that form the heart of the Niger Delta. With its fragile huts made of thatched palm fronds and mud, Obioku is typical of many fishing villages in the Delta. It is small and dirt poor, despite the region's oil wealth.
Children play homemade drums along the sandy paths of the village. Soldiers are guarding Obioku after deadly clashes over land rights with neighbouring Odioma town last year. Both communities have laid claim to an area that Shell is planning to explore for oil.
More than a dozen Obioku people were killed, including the18-year-old daughter of Chief Ayebanoa Stephen Debo, a fisherman. He said conflicts over oil were fuelled by poverty and greed in a nominally rich region. But, said Chief Debo, there's no trickle down.
“That's why we're looking to Shell to help us, so that we can be able to survive,” the chief said. “I'm trying to weave my net for fishing. If you have the tools, if you're having the nets, engine and the boat to move along, you can feed yourself.”
There are few jobs in Obioku and no grid electricity or running water. The village women, like Cordelia Bendick, say their children get sick because of the muddy, brown water they use in everyday life.
All oil revenues in Nigeria go to the central government, which hands back 13 percent to the oil-producing states. Niger Delta villagers, like the people of Obioku, criticise the Nigerian government and Shell. The say that's not enough.
Don Boham, the manager of corporate external affairs at Shell's Nigeria headquarters Port Harcourt, says that the government is responsible for these villages, not Shell.
“Expectations have increased … on the role that the oil companies have to play in providing basic amenities, whereas it is rightly the responsibility of government,” Boham said.
Whoever is responsible, foreign oil workers are now bearing the brunt of local anger. Kidnapping has become an occupational hazard. The government claims it's doing what it can to protect all those living and working in the Delta. The authorities have dismissed the militants as nothing more than criminals.
“It's very unfortunate where people with criminal intentions and criminal mentality have [basically] taken the law into their own hands and have started kidnapping people for reasons that are far from political,” said Femi Fani-Kayode, a presidential spokesman.
Local people and militants may be focused on their own interests, but disquiet and unrest in Nigeria's Niger Delta impact the world. Stop-go oil output has a knock-on effect on energy and gas prices in the United States, which gets one fifth of its crude oil imports from Nigeria.
President Bush has said he wants to see more supplies from this region. Neglecting the delta communities could spell disaster warns Nalaguo Chris Alagoa, a Niger Delta activist working on conflict prevention and resolution.
“The Niger Delta is like a keg of gunpowder at the bottom of Nigeria. If nothing is done, it has the capacity of exploding,” Alagoa said. “And when it explodes like dynamite, it will blow everything that is above it to smithereens.”
Villagers in many poorly-developed parts of the Niger Delta, like Obioku, say they don't agree with the abduction of foreign oil workers because it's against the law. But many also say they understand the motives behind the militants' sabotage campaign: to make news and try to improve their lives. “We are still begging the Shell people to help us, help us to do something to help ourselves with our family and husbands,” villager Cordelia Bendick said. read more

Mar 10, 2006
BEIJING, March 10 Asia Pulse – China's biggest coal company, the Shenhua Group, will start production at its first coal-to-liquid project at the end of next year, a scheme that will supply 1 million tons of oil products a year to North China.
The project will be the country's first facility producing oil from coal and has great market potential in China, which relies on coal for about 70 per cent of its energy needs and aims to cut the import of high-priced oil.
“Seventy-five per cent of our factory facilities will be completed by the end of this year,” Zhang Yuzhuo, vice-president of Shenhua, told China Daily yesterday. Currently, 35 per cent of the factory has been built.
The project, located in the north-western Ordos Basin that has rich coal reserves, will use Shenhua's cutting-edge technology to produce refined oil products, such as gasoline and diesel, from coal taken from Shenfu Dongshen mine, Zhang said.
Shenhua, which had spent about 300 million yuan (US$37 million) into the research and development of its coal liquefaction technology since 1997, began building facilities in August 2004, Zhang said.
The technology, of which Shenhua owns full intellectual property rights, will directly convert coal into oil products, without producing crude oil as the intermediate material.
Of the 1 million tons of oil products coming from the new plant, in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, 70 per cent will be diesel. Other products include gasoline, naphtha and LPG (liquefied petroleum gas), the Shenhua vice-president said.
“We will sell our products to neighbouring areas in North China,” Zhang said, adding that Shenhua will work with the country's big oil companies, like Sinopec and PetroChina, to sell the products.
The economic prospects are impressive, Zhang said. “We will have good business returns if the crude oil price stays above US$30 a barrel.”
The price of crude oil for April delivery hit US$60.80 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Wednesday.
Even if the government continues to cap the prices of oil products in China, which leaves many of the country's oil refineries just profitable as crude prices soar, the Shenhua coal-to-liquid project will bring satisfactory returns, Zhang said.
The wholesale price of diesel is now more than 3,000 yuan a ton.
The nation's top economic policy organisation, the National Development and Reform Commission, earlier said it was working to improve the current oil pricing mechanism by introducing a closer link between domestic and world prices.
That means the price of domestic oil, which is now more than 1,000 yuan a ton lower than the global level, will be raised further, industry analysts said.
Shenhua last week signed a memorandum of understanding with the world's third-biggest listed oil company by market value, Royal Dutch Shell, to develop another coal liquefaction project in Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
Zhang yesterday said its Ningxia project is still at the preliminary stages and will not start production for four to five years.
(XIC) read more

By REUTERS
LAGOS (Reuters) – Nigerian militants engaged soldiers in a fierce gun battle in the southern delta in an unsuccessful attempt to capture a fuel tanker, military officials said on Thursday.
The militants, who are holding three foreign hostages, said they killed at least seven soldiers, but the military said two of their men were injured and two or three militants died in the 45-minute firefight on Wednesday evening.
“They wanted to seize a fuel tanker, but they were repelled,'' an army spokesman said.
The militants, who are fighting for more local control over the delta's oil resources, had earlier described the firefight as an attack by the army on their patrol boats in the Escravos River area on the western side of the vast wetlands region.
It was the latest in a series of confrontations between troops and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, whose attacks on the oil industry have cut oil exports from the leading OPEC nation by a fifth.
The army spokesman said the tanker was carrying fuel and was due to berth at Warri where the state oil company has a refinery.
Having released six hostages last week, the militants are still holding three foreign oil workers — two Americans and one Briton — since a series of raids on Feb 18. which forced Royal Dutch Shell to cut 455,000 barrels a day output, or one fifth of Nigerian output.
On Wednesday, the militants named an ethnic Ijaw activist as mediator for talks with the government, raising hopes of a speedy resolution to the three-month-old crisis.
It followed the removal of the head of the military in the Niger Delta on suspicion of involvement in the theft of crude oil, government sources said.
The army said his removal was a routine redeployment.
Both sides have accused each other of being involved in the illicit trade, estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and diplomats say it is at the root of much of the insecurity in the region.
The militants said they had received reports of army patrols firing indiscriminately into Ijaw communities near the village of Odidi.
“In the light of this, we are considering what further actions to take against the military and Shell installations in Forcados and Odidi,'' the militants said.
Shell has already evacuated all its staff from the Forcados region, and shut all its production from the western side of the delta. Company officials were not available to comment. read more

By REUTERS
Published: March 9, 2006
Filed at 6:54 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With the chiefs of big U.S. energy companies headed to Capitol Hill next week to discuss record profits, a key U.S. Republican senator is weighing a plan to discourage mergers and profiteering.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is drawing up legislation that would boost federal authority to block oil and gas mergers and prosecute companies that try to exacerbate supply shortages, according to a draft distributed by the committee on Thursday.
The “Petroleum Industry Antitrust Act of 2006'' would also allow the U.S. attorney general to sue oil producing cartels if they try to limit production or set prices — a provision aimed squarely at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Specter's draft “will be used as a basis for discussion and questioning'' at a March 14 Judiciary Committee hearing on the effect of oil and gas industry consolidation on energy prices, the committee said in a press release.
Among those expected to testify at the hearing are the chief executives of the two largest U.S. oil companies — Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. Executives from ConocoPhillips, Valero Energy Corp. and the U.S. units of BP Plc. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc. are also expected to attend, according to Capitol Hill sources.
Exxon drew much consumer outrage against gasoline prices after posting profit of more than $36 billion last year — the largest annual profit ever reported by a U.S company.
A November Senate hearing featuring U.S. oil and gas chief executives spawned lots of political rhetoric but little action. A push by some lawmakers from both parties to enact a windfall profits tax on oil companies failed to gain traction.
Specter's bill does not mention windfall profits.
Instead, it would make it unlawful for U.S. companies to export or divert supplies of crude oil, refined products and natural gas for the purpose of causing a shortage.
It also says no entity that buys or sells petroleum, petroleum products or natural gas in the United States can be acquired by another party “if the effect of such acquisition may be to appreciably diminish competition.''
The so-called “NOPEC'' section of the bill revives a plan that was dropped from wide-sweeping energy legislation signed into law last year.
The provisions are aimed at giving the U.S. executive branch the power to take action against OPEC, which pumps about a third of the world's crude oil.
Specter's bill would allow the U.S. attorney general to bring suit in any U.S. district court if foreign states act collectively to limit production, set prices or restrain supply. read more

By Ruth Sullivan
Published: March 10 2006 02:00 | Last updated: March 10 2006 02:00
Royal Dutch Shell's board intends to propose Nick Land as a non-executive director at the annual meeting on May 16.
He would replace Sir Peter Burt, who is retiring.
Mr Land has been chairman and chief executive of Ernst & Young, the accountancy firm, since 1995.
The oil company issued a statement saying Ernst & Young was not its external auditor but rendered some non-audit services to Royal Dutch Shell companies on an annual basis.
It added: “Nick Land had no involvement in these services and will step down from all positions at Ernst & Young upon joining the board of the company.” read more

Associated Press
March 10, 2006; Page A15
LAGOS, Nigeria — A Nigerian militant group holding three foreign oil workers hostage said its fighters clashed with army troops in the country's oil-rich delta region.
A wave of militant attacks over the past two months has forced Nigeria to cut daily exports by 20%. Nigeria normally produces about 2.5 million barrels of oil a day.
Militants have threatened more violence in Africa's biggest crude producer. Besides the kidnappings, militants have blown up oil pipelines and attacked two of Royal Dutch Shell PLC's oil platforms in recent months.
The militants said in an emailed statement that their vessel was attacked Wednesday on the Escravos River by four navy patrol boats, sparking a 45-minute gun battle they claimed left seven government soldiers dead.
But a senior military official disputed that account. The official said militants had seized a vessel laden with gasoline, prompting a distress call after which troops clashed with militants. Four soldiers and a policeman died in the ensuing firefight, during which the vessel was rescued, the official said.
The militant Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta says it is fighting to win a greater share of oil wealth on behalf of the Niger Delta's impoverished inhabitants, who have remained poor despite the fact that most of Nigeria's oil is being pumped from the swampy region. read more

By Liz Chong
Nick Land, the outgoing chairman of Ernst & Young, says he will have to “go up the learning curve” when he joins Shell in July as a non-executive director.
Mr Land, 58, will take up his new post just a month after stepping down from the “Big Four” accountancy firm, which he guided for more than a decade.
He said: “I really have enjoyed myself here. But anybody who has spent the bulk of their career at one organisation will wonder what would have happened if they had left and done something else.
“Though it’s a bit late in life, I’m very excited about trying different things.”
The only son of a schoolteacher, Mr Land grew up near Brighton. He joined Ernst & Young in 1970 as an auditor and became a partner in 1978.
Appointed chairman in 1995, Mr Land served three terms in the post, staying on to steer the firm through the lawsuit from Equitable Life.
He said: “Equitable was an interesting experience, though I’d rather not have had it.”
But Mr Land credits E&Y with more than his career, having met Sonia, his Singaporean wife, when she joined the firm’s London office in 1972.
The couple were married in 1975 and Mrs Land left E&Y to run a literary agency. They have one son, Chris, who is in the second year of a training contract at KPMG.
A keen DIY man, Mr Land enjoys pottering around at home and watching his wife work in the garden — though he does not enjoy gardening himself. He is also a fan of ballet. read more

Natural Resources
Up 0.2%
Soco International, the oil group, which reported a 125 per cent jump in full-year pre-tax profits to $33.7 million (£19.4 million), announced further drilling success in Vietnam.
Petrobas, Brazil’s state oil company, is in partnership talks with Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil about spending $18 billion to develop the Santos Basin.
Shares in Imperial Energy fell after the AIM-listed company confirmed the start of production from its oilfields in the Tomsk region of Russia. read more