Athabasca takes the offshore route: Oilsands players look abroad for added expertise
Financial Post – Canada; May 02, 2006
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In his groundbreaking 2005 book, The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist, talks about how technological advancements such as the World Wide Web flattened the world by eliminating global geopolitical barriers, encouraging trends including the offshoring of knowledge work to China and India and other lower-cost, skills-rich and eager places.read more
ABU DHABI (Reuters) – Saudi Aramco said on Monday it hopes to sign deals with Total (TOTF.PA) and ConocoPhillipsfor two new refineries in the kingdom by the end of May.
“The company board of directors last week approved the recommendation to engage in MoUs with these two companies and now these companies will have to obtain approval from their own board,'' Khalid al-Buainain, vice president of refining at Aramco told reporters at an oil and gas conference in Abu Dhabi.read more
Mitsui, Mitsubishi in talks for supply of LNG output from Sakhalin – report
AFX Asia (Focus); May 02, 2006
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TOKYO (AFX) – Trading companies Mitsui & Co and Mitsubishi Corp plan to provide liquefied natural gas from the Sakhalin 2 project off the eastern coast of Russia to Chubu Electric Power Co and Osaka Gas Co, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported without citing sources.read more
SINGAPORE PRESS: Shell, Exxon Mobil Mull New Investments
SINGAPORE (Dow Jones)–Oil companies Shell and Exxon Mobil (XOM) are considering new investments in Singapore worth several billion dollars, according to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the Business Times reported Tuesday.
Shell is close to a final decision on building a new steam cracker in Bukom with a capacity of around one million tons, while ExxonMobil is in an “advanced study stage” for a second cracker on Jurong Island, Lee told an election rally, according to the report. read more
African News Dimension (South Africa): Nigeria: Senate panel indicts NNPC, Shell, others in Bonga projects
By AND Nigeria
(Information added by ShellNews.net: “SNEPCO” is the abbreviation for Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company Limited.)
ALLEGING grave irregularities in the Bonga Oil Field development project, the Senate Committee on the Upstream Petroleum Sector, has recommended the payment of USD 4,691,2b to the Federal Government by Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company (SNEPCO). read more
By Daniel Engber Posted Monday, May 1, 2006, at 6:18 PM ET
Download the MP3 audio version of this story here, or sign up for The Explainer's free daily podcast oniTunes.
The governing board of Bee County, Texas, has called for a boycott of ExxonMobil gas stations starting Monday. According to a poll conducted by the Beeville Bee-Picayune, 72 percent of county residents will participate; they hope to force pump prices down to $1.30 a gallon. Can a consumer boycott really affect gas prices?read more
New Shell chairman outlines four prioritiesMay 2 2006
REALISING the challenges ahead in making the company stronger, Shell Malaysia chairman Saw Choo Boon has outlined four priorities to keep its business going and growing.
The four priorities are to maintain the current buoyant economic performance, continue to grow its business, attract more and different global shared service hubs to Malaysia, and continue to recruit and train staff.
“All these are important to ensure that we will be present in Malaysia for another 100 years,” he said.
During a recent interview with Business Times, Saw spoke at length about Shell Malaysia’s progress since it first discovered oil well in Miri, Sarawak, in 1910, the outlook of the industry in Malaysia, and commented on the current escalating price of oil.read more
A guide to company results and meetings, and economic statistics
Tuesday May 2
Technology company CSR should deliver strong first-quarter results on the back of sales of its mobile phones and headsets. Charles Stanley forecasts pre-tax profit of $26m (£14.4m) for the three months to March compared with $10.9m in the same period a year earlier.
Sands of grime put Canada in energy elite By Fred Langan (Filed: 02/05/2006)
High in northern Alberta a company called Syncrude is mining oil from a black pit that measures 35,000 acres. Giant lorries, the largest in the world, take three loads of oil sands from a huge shovel then deliver it to a crusher on its way to becoming oil.
“Each truck carries about 400 tons of material and we get about 200 barrels of oil from that,” says Jim Carter, president and chief operating officer of Syncrude, the largest oil sands operator in the world. The Fort McMurray, Alberta, company is a consortium owned by seven firms, including Canadian Oil Sands Trust (37pc), Imperial Oil, which is the Canadian arm of Exxon Mobil, (25pc) and Petro Canada (12pc). read more
FEATURE-Sakhalin weighs environmental cost of Shell project
01 May 2006 22:30:05 GMTSource: Reuters
By Tom Bergin
STARODUBSKOYE, Russia, May 2 (Reuters) – Soil particles hang suspended in the frozen water and machine-crushed stone has replaced pebbles on the riverbed since a consortium led by Royal Dutch Shell dug it up to lay an oil pipeline.
“There was a spawning ground here but they have destroyed it,” said Dmitry Lisitsyn, an environmentalist on Sakhalin island, a harsh, starkly beautiful land off Russia's Far East.
Lisitsyn said that when the thaw comes, soil particles in the ice and from damaged river banks will seep downstream and leave large parts of the river unsuitable for spawning fish.
Residents of Sakhalin, historically one of Russia's poorest regions, had great hopes for Shell's giant oil and gas project, the biggest undertaken by the Anglo-Dutch oil major <RDSa.L>.
However, some people on the island north of Japan now fear the environmental costs of the $20 billion project may leave them worse off than before.
The consortium's fields contain 4.5 billion barrels of reserves but extracting them is complicated because they lie under the feeding grounds of the critically endangered Western Grey Whale, and the sea in the north is frozen for six months.
Shell and its Japanese partners Mitsui <8031.T> and Mitsubishi <8058.T> must construct an 800-km (500-mile) pipeline to a new export terminal on ice-free Aniva Bay in the south.
The pipeline must cross 1,100 rivers and water courses — home to salmon spawning grounds — and the terminal requires dredging and dumping in Aniva Bay.
Islanders are not too worried about the whales, the focus of opposition from western environmental groups. They are more concerned about the fishing industry, which accounts for 22 percent of industrial production and employs 40,000 of the 530,000-strong population during the summer salmon season.
SHELL EMBLEM
At the port city of Korsakov, near the export terminal, residents say the project is already causing problems.
One elderly man told a public meeting that a local firm could no longer sell seaweed to Japanese customers because of the perception that Aniva Bay was polluted.
Others said that since the dredging and dumping, once-rich harvests of lucrative scallops — whose shell is the oil giant's corporate emblem — had dwindled. “We are worried about the environmental dangers of a potential oil spill … (but) … our troubles are centred on scallops,” Korsakov Mayor Gennadiy Zlivko said.
The Korsakov meeting was hosted by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which is assessing the environmental and social effects before deciding whether to advance a loan to the consortium, called Sakhalin Energy.
In November, Sakhalin's sole representative in the federal parliament, Ivan Zhdakayev, wrote to the EBRD saying the project did not meet the bank's strict policies, citing non-compliance with environmental and economic requirements.
Last week, conservation group WWF said the EBRD should not grant the loan without more measures to protect the environment. It said ice and poor weather around the fields would make it nearly impossible to clean up any spills for half of the year. Jeroen van der Veer, Shell's chief executive, said earlier this year that from an environmental perspective the project was one of the best in Russia.
Sakhalin Energy says careful execution and monitoring means the river crossings will have little impact on spawning areas.
It says it moved an offshore pipeline route away from the whales' feeding grounds to remove any threat and that dredging and dumping in Aniva Bay was limited to a small part.
Despite describing some early river crossings as “appalling”, improved practices have led EBRD environmental officials to deem the work acceptable, while even environmentalists accept Sakhalin Energy's performance is mostly better than Russian oil firms' traditional record.
The EBRD's board is expected to vote in June on whether to approve the $300 million loan to support the project.
DEVELOPMENT WORRIES
Officials at the bank say some of the complaints about risks are a form of negotiation — common on the part of communities near oil developments — to extract more benefits from Shell, the world's third-largest listed oil firm by market value.
Many residents, especially outside the capital Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, say they have not gained much from the project, although unemployment has fallen from 20 percent in 1999 to 7.1 percent in 2004, according to EBRD figures.
“No sustainable business development has been created on Sakhalin,” Ivan Stepanchenko, a member of a small business association, told an EBRD public meeting in the capital.
Sakhalin is unlikely to develop an oil services industry like that of Scotland's North Sea hub Aberdeen, said Michael Bradshaw, professor of human geography at Britain's University of Leicester.
The economy is likely to remain dependent on fishing, making it vulnerable to any environmental damage caused by the project, or even the perception of such damage.
So far, official data suggests salmon stocks are buoyant and EBRD officials said there was no convincing evidence of any negative impact on the whales. Shell has, however, been hit. The environmental disputes and partly related cost overruns have damaged its reputation, and led investors and analysts to question the way it handles big, environmentally-sensitive projects. “Shell should have been able to spot that dealing with endangered whales was likely to require exceptionally careful handling and the deployment of best practice in every respect,” Citigroup said in a research note.
Sakhalin could also harm Shell's ability to turn around one of the poorest industry records for adding new reserves. “Despite many key international project successes over recent years, Sakhalin may appear as a black mark on Shell's resume when it pitches to resource-holding nations for involvement in future world-scale projects,” said Jason Kenney at ING.
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JOHN DONOVAN TV DOCUMENTARY INTERVIEW
SHELL EXECUTIVES AT THE CENTER OF A SCHEME TO STEAL $1.3 BILLION FROM NIGERIA’S PEOPLE
SHELL ADMITS DEALING WITH NIGERIAN MONEY LAUNDERER – BBC NEWS
SHELL, ENI AND NIGERIAN OFFICIALS IN OPL 245 CORRUPTION SCANDAL
INVESTIGATION OF OPL 245 NIGERIAN OIL CORRUPTION SCANDAL
DUTCH EARTHQUAKES CAUSED BY SHELL/EXXON
SHELL KILLS FOR OIL IN NIGERIA
SHELL LIED ABOUT CLEANING UP OIL IN NIGER DELTA
SHELL SPIES INFILTRATED NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT
LEGO DROPS SHELL OVER GREENPEACE OIL SPILL VIDEO
SHELL ARCTIC DRILLING ACCIDENTS
SHELL KNEW ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE DECADES AGO
ROYAL DUTCH SHELL FOUNDER SIR HENRI DETERDING, NAZI FINANCIER
JOHN DONOVAN PROMOTIONAL GAMES FOR SHELL AND OTHER CLIENTS
Listen and read proof in audio and transcript form of Shell CEO Ben van Beurden’s cover-up tactics in the OPL 245 Nigerian corruption scandal. The instruction given by him in the covertly recorded call to CFO Simon Henry was at odds with Shell’s claimed core business principles. Cover-up and obstruction, instead of transparency and integrity, says Shell critic John Donovan
I ordered shell energy broadband on nov 2. I was promised connection the following week. They initiated the direct debit. I called the following week and was told router would arrive on 13 and service would go live on 17. No further email or communication until 20 when I was told service would start on 30th. Spent 10 minutes waiting on phone line and spoke to a polite assistant who was absolutely useless in solving my problem. Avoid this unprofessional and chaotic… Read more
Shell Energy Broadband Service is Appalling
The worst ever
I used shell broadband. It was by far the worst broadband provider ever! The internet did not work most days. I had their super fast broadband and it dropped out constantly. Watching a movie was awful with the constant buffering. Customer support was super slow. Now their going to charge me for the useless router which I have sent back.
Date of experience: 21 November 2023
By far the worst broadband provider ever!
30 November 2023: Posted by John Donovan
The content below is sourced from current verifiable customer reviews of Shell Energy published on Trustpilot.
Extremely slow broadband for 10 months, not fixed.I have had slow broadband well below the guaranteed speed for 10 months and Shell Energy have not been able to fix it.They have tried sending about 4 or 5 engineers but have not fixed the problem.Gurps, who I have been dealing with most recently, has been friendly and polite, alth… Read more
Extremely Slow Shell Broadband
The worst ever
I used shell broadband. It was by far the worst broadband provider ever! The internet did not work most days. I had their super fast broadband and it dropped out constantly. Watching a movie was awful with the constant buffering. Customer support was super slow. Now their going to charge me for the useless router which I have sent back.
Date of experience: 21 November 2023
By far the worst broadband provider ever!
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