BATON ROUGE, La. – The state’s efforts to protect marine life in coastal waters and the Gulf of Mexico have received a boost with a $450,000 donation from Shell.

Denver Post

Greene: Integrity breaks new ground at Interior Department

It takes a special something to become the first and only member of George W. Bush’s Cabinet investigated formally for criminal corruption.

That distinction goes to Colorado’s own Gale Norton.

I write not to inflict more infamy on the former interior secretary as federal grand jury subpoenas make their way into her mailbox.

Rather, it’s worth noting how far the Interior Department has come since Norton, her successor and their one-time boss, the former oilman turned president, were giving away oil-shale leases like samples at Costco.

It’s tough to keep straight all the scandals that plagued the Bush Interior Department, what with its Jack Abramoff entanglements and the sex, drug use and graft rampant in its oil and gas royalties office.

Let’s not forget the stink for which Norton is being probed. After resigning from interior, she took a job as an adviser to the oil-shale division of Royal Dutch Shell — the company to which she had granted three of the much-coveted six leases to extract oil from Bureau of Land Management land.

After 100 years of mostly fruitless efforts, oil shale is still, at best, experimental. The leases allow companies to test technologies that ram-rod rock with massive heated prongs. With virtually no accountability, it gives them free rein to expand their research into five commercial developments in Colorado.

A grand jury is investigating whether Norton illegally used her interior job to benefit the company. (You think?) She was subpoenaed last week.

As if the first round of leases wasn’t bad enough, the Bush administration’s handling of the second was even worse. In January, days before Bush left office, Norton’s interior successor proposed adding leases that would have given an advantage to Shell and the three companies holding the other existing leases. It also would have added large swatches of testing grounds in Colorado — potentially worth billions — while lowering royalties to the feds.

The move was a giveaway to Bush’s oil buddies just as he was walking out the door.

What does this mean for you and me?

Colorado is to oil shale what Newcastle is to coal, estimated to hold more than 1.5 trillion barrels. Our economy went bust with the collapse of oil-shale exploration in 1982.

If our motherlode were to be tapped to its full capacity, heating rocks, cooling them and processing the oil would — under the current state-of-the-art technology proposed by Shell — require 10 power plants the size of the largest plant currently operating in Colorado, according to data gleaned from a Rand Corp. analysis. Extraction also could drain the state’s dwindling water supplies.

“We need to decide whether we dedicate water for oil shale to fuel taxis in New York City or whether we use it to fuel growth in Colorado,” says Dave Little, chief planner for Denver Water.

To his credit, Ken Salazar halted the second round of leases when he took over the Interior Department for the Obama administration in January. On Tuesday, he ordered a second investigation into Bush’s latest oil-shale shenanigans.

Salazar walks a fine line, given what’s at stake in terms of production, and that Obama won office partly by calling for energy independence.

Let’s hope this Coloradan bases his next move on sound science and not jockeying for his next job.

Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.

The federal Minerals Management Service this week deemed Shell Oil’s application to drill exploration wells in the Chukchi Sea next year to be complete. That triggers a 30-day deadline for the MMS to review the plan and decide whether to approve it, reject it or require changes.

The Department of Justice already has launched a probe into whether Bush’s Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton used her position to steer three of the six potentially lucrative oil leases to Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the company she works for now.

Rise of the gripe site

Extracts from Prospect Magazine Article “Rise of the gripe site”: February 2007
By Derek Brower, senior correspondent Petroleum Economist

How two men and a website in Colchester humbled one of the oil industry giants

It is not the kind of place you would expect to find at the centre of a global energy war. John Donovan’s office is in a modest house in a suburb of Colchester. No electronic maps of Europe adorn his walls, as they do the walls of Gazprom’s Moscow control room. And nor are there any butlers bringing cups of tea and expensive biscuits, as you find at Shell’s head office on the Thames. There is just Donovan’s 89-year-old father, Alfred, in the room next door.

But it is the home of www.royaldutchshellplc.com. a website which can claim to have cost Shell billions of dollars-and helped Vladimir Putin score another victory over western energy interests. This is how.

At the end of December, the Kremlin’s politically driven campaign to win control of a liquefied natural gas project on Sakhalin Island came to its predictable climax. The deal signed in Moscow between Shell and Gazprom saw the Russian company take 50 per cent plus one share of Sakhalin Energy, the consortium developing the project.

It was an offer that Shell and its two Japanese partners on Sakhalin could not refuse. The project, on a remote island notorious for its harsh winters, is one of the largest ever attempted. Sakhalin Energy will produce 9.6m tonnes per year of liquefied natural gas and 180,000 barrels per day of oil when it comes on stream in 2008.

But Sakhalin ran into serious problems. The most important was its escalating costs. In the mid-1990s, when Shell signed the contract, the oil price was low and Russia was on its knees financially. Moscow needed the expertise Shell offered. But by the time Shell was announcing a doubling of costs on Sakhalin, President Putin was rather less respectful of foreign energy companies. The cost increase-which postponed, some said indefinitely, the moment when Russia would profit from the production of its own energy reserves-was too much for impatient officials in Moscow.

To get control of the project, the Kremlin … suddenly got green. It unleashed Rosprirodnadzor, the country’s environmental watchdog, on Sakhalin. The alleged environmental abuses of the project-including deforestation, disruption of marine life, and careless infrastructure across an earthquake-prone region-are so bad that they “threaten to make Exxon Valdez look small,” says one insider.

Oleg Mitvol-the deputy head of Rosprirodnadzor, who was entrusted with the job of bringing Sakhalin Energy to heel-had by last December accumulated sufficient evidence of Shell’s and its partners’ abuses to lay charges against the consortium amounting to $30bn. There were also threats that the licence to develop the project could be removed.

With the green gun at its head, Shell allowed Gazprom to take control of the project-giving Russia an immediate share of profits and oversight of costs.

Taking the role of the humiliated man seriously, Shell’s head Jeroen van der Veer thanked Putin for helping to resolve the conflict.

What most astonished Shell was the detailed inside knowledge Mitvol had accumulated about the company’s abuses. Some in the company suspected industrial espionage. But it was actually information that the Donovans of Colchester were passing to Mitvol. The two men had received detailed material about Shell’s ecological abuses on Sakhalin: a catalogue of corner-cutting, mismanagement and efforts to cover up damaging evidence.

They say they got this information from Shell insiders. Mitvol clearly trusted the material, and in December he admitted for the first time publicly that his deep throat on Sakhalin was John Donovan.

The Donovan website has become an open wound for Shell. The Anglo-Dutch giant has tried to shut it down on the grounds that it uses the company name. However, as www.royaldutchshellplc.com makes no money, this hasn’t worked.

“We wanted it to become a magnet for people who had a problem with the company,” Donovan told me when I visited him recently. It has. The Ogoni tribe of Nigeria uses the website to spread information about Shell’s activities in the Niger delta. And unhappy Shell insiders frequently post on the site’s live chat facility.

“I’ve also heard that Athabasca Sands in Canada has some serious cost problems developing,” wrote one anonymous contributor in December. “Anyone know if that is true or not? If so, Shell is really on the ropes, with Canada & Sakhalin over-budget, reserves shrinking & Nigeria production being lost by the day.”

The site had around 1.7m hits in November. Its role in Shell’s embarrassment on Sakhalin has raised its profile. Understandably, the company is worried about the information that leaks on to the website: Donovan says that it has taken out injunctions to stop at least one of its disgruntled geologists from posting on the site. He also says that his site and its whistleblowing insiders were well ahead of the pack on Shell’s reserves scandal of 2003-04, when the company inflated its oil and gas reserves by some 20 per cent.

The source of John Donovan’s grudge … centres on the accusation that Shell stole intellectual property belonging to him and his father. They had been in the garage business since the 1950s and began selling ideas for promotions to attract customers to petrol stations. A typical scheme would involve a tie-in to a popular film. Shell liked the ideas that Don Marketing, the Donovans’ company, sold to them, says Donovan, and sales increased by 30 per cent on the back of some of the campaigns.

Then, says Donovan, in the early 1990s, a new manager in Shell’s promotions division started stealing the ideas. The men complained to the company’s senior management but were ignored. Offended that a company with which they had worked for so long should treat them this way, the Donovans began their guerrilla war.

After various legal actions, Shell agreed to settle out of court, paying the Donovans a sum “in the thousands” as part of a “peace treaty” stipulating that neither party speak about the matter in future. The Donovans were disappointed by the sum-their claim had been for around £1m- but accepted “under duress.” That was in 1999. But, says Donovan, Shell later broke the “peace treaty” by making disparaging remarks about them.

So Donovan launched his website-which costs only around £1 a week to run. And thanks to the ecological problems on Sakhalin, Shell’s poor record for bringing projects on stream on time and on budget and the power of the web, the Donovan grudge against Shell came to a spectacular climax in December.

Donovan is not worried that his site became an instrument in the Russian government’s ambition to become an energy superpower.

“Shell is not the worst oil company in the world,” says Donovan, “but we feel they mistreated us very badly.” Shell could have settled with the two men for £1m in 1998. Instead, Shell settled with the Russian government in December, with $30bn in fines hanging over the company’s head.

Leaflet published in October 2009 by John Donovan of royaldutchshellplc.com

On Jan. 15–days before President Barack Obama took office–the Interior Department offered exclusive “lucrative benefits” to six oil-shale lease holders in a way that raised “serious concerns,” Mr. Salazar wrote in a letter to the Interior Department’s inspector general. Three of those leases are held by a unit of Royal Dutch Shell PLC for parcels in Colorado.

Royal Dutch Shell holds three of the Colorado R&D leases and is currently part of an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department of former Bush Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who later accepted a job with Shell. The DOJ is investigating whether Norton, a former Colorado attorney general, gave favorable treatment to Shell in exchange for a position with the company.

LEAFLET CURRENTLY BEING GIVEN TO SHELL EMPLOYEES OUTSIDE SHELL CENTRE

Shell offshore workers died as a result of Brinded’s “Touch F*** All” safety regime

Published by John Donovan of royaldutchshellplc.com Oct 2009

A criminal investigation is currently underway in Scotland relating to alleged corruption allegations involving Shell and officials of the Health & Safety Executive. The investigation follows an email a retired former HSE Group Auditor of Shell International sent to over 600 UK Members of Parliament.

Bill Campbell explained in his email (reprinted below) how the lives of Shell employees working on the Brent Bravo oil platform in the North Sea were lost after Shell senior management put production and profits before safely.

Senior officials at Royal Dutch Shell Plc had sight of Campbell’s email before it was sent. Campbell received cross-party support for his calls for an investigation.

THE BILL CAMPBELL EMAIL TO UK MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT

Subject: This could be the most important whistleblower email you have ever received.

Some unfortunate Royal Dutch Shell workers have already lost their lives. More lives are at stake.

My name is Bill Campbell. I am a former Group Auditor of Shell International. I am writing to you on a matter of conscience in an effort to avert the inevitability of another major accident in the North Sea. The consequences could potentially impact on families in many constituencies, including your own.

As Royal Dutch Shell and the Health & Safety Executive would acknowledge, I am an expert on safety matters relating to offshore oil and gas platforms. In 1999, I was appointed by Shell to lead a safety audit on the Brent Bravo platform. The audit revealed a platform management culture that basically gave a higher priority to production than the safety of Shell employees. To our astonishment we discovered that a “Touch F*** All” policy was in place. Worse still, safety records were routinely falsified and repairs bodged.

I personally brought the shocking situation to the attention of senior management including Malcolm Brinded, the then Managing Director of Shell Exploration & Production. I revealed that ESDV leak-off tests were purposely falsified, not once but many times and that Brent Bravo platform management had admitted responsibility for the dangerous practices being followed. In response to my team ringing alarm bells, management pledged to rectify the serious problems, which had been uncovered. When I later complained that the pledges were not being kept, I was removed from my oversight function.

Four years later, a massive gas leak occurred on the platform. Two workers lost their lives. I have no doubt at all that the inaction of the relevant Asset Manager, the General Manager, the Oil Director and Malcolm Brinded, contributed in some part to the unlawful killing of two persons on Brent Bravo in September 2003.

Shell subsequently pleaded guilty to breaches of the HSE regulations and a record-breaking £900,000 fine was imposed. I thought this would bring about a real change in policy to put the emphasis on safety.

Unfortunately I was wrong. Although I supplied the evidence related to 1999, and the fact that there had been a collapse in controls of integrity from 1999 to 2003 on all 16 of Shell’s North Sea offshore installations covered in a post fatality integrity review to the HSE for review by the Procurator Fiscal, none of this evidence was presented before the Sheriff at the subsequent Inquiry. The situation is explained in a letter to the Procurator Fiscal and the Sheriff (on 24th February 2007).

Shell management has engaged in spin to try to pretend that it is getting to grips with its safety problem. However, its atrocious safety record – the worst in the North Sea in terms of accidental deaths and absolute number of enforcement actions – tells a different story. This fact has resulted in a number of newspaper articles.

I have had meetings with senior Shell people including its CEO Mr. Jeroen van der Veer. I regret to say that I have found him to be economical with the truth. He prefers to support cover-up and deceit rather than confronting the underlying problems. Brinded is now Executive Director of Shell Exploration & Production. He believes in burying evidence.

My family and friends would probably prefer me to give up on this matter and enjoy my retirement after so many years working for Shell.

However, by writing to every MP in the UK, no one can ever say that I did not do my best to avert an inevitable further major accident event in the North Sea. When it happens (I pray that I am wrong) I will make this warning communication available to the media together with the vast amount of evidence in my possession.

At least my conscience is clear. I have done everything possible to ring the alarm bells about Shell management and its unscrupulous attitude to the safety of its employees.

Yours sincerely

Bill Campbell (EMAIL ENDS)

Internal correspondence we obtained from Shell under the Data Protection Act revealed that Shell had set up a countermeasures team to combat our joint campaign with Bill Campbell for Shell offshore employee safety. It was clear from the internal emails that Shell had been panic stricken by the prospect of a Campbell/Donovan campaign. Shell EP General Counsel Keith Ruddock wrote to Campbell’s solicitors desperately doing his best to kill the prospective alliance. A stated aim in the internal emails was to “detach” Campbell from the Donovans. The revelations generated newspaper headlines: “Shell on back foot as ‘gripe’ site’ alleges safety concerns” (Daily Mail) and “Pressure on Shell over safety of platforms” (Daily Telegraph).

Jeroen van der Veer was later quoted in a Guardian article in August 2007 as being “hurt” by our criticism over Shell’s safety record. Yet on 1 Feb 08, Channel 4 News led its broadcast with a 7-minute package: “Shell North Sea Safety Concerns”. On 23 Feb 08, Shell pleaded guilty at Chester Crown Court to safety offences’ arising from a potential “near disaster” at Stanlow Refinery arising from a lethal gas leak. In March 08, an UpstreamOnline article revealed that Shell had received more HSE legal notices than any other operator working in the UK North Sea. It also reported that two Brent field lifeboats, one on Brent Bravo, had to be removed from service because they were in a dangerous condition. In early October 09, an HSE Prohibition Notice was served on Shell after a potentially deadly gas leak on Shell Brent Charlie platform.

We are therefore forced to conclude that despite a Shell “safety czar” (Kieron McFadyen) being appointed, it was just another example of empty Shell PR propaganda. In reality, nothing has changed. A reckless attitude to safety issues remains the key feature of the unscrupulous reign of Shell EP / Upstream International Executive director, Malcolm “TFA” Brinded.

Conservationists say the decision by the Obama administration to allow drilling in the Beaufort Sea repeats Bush era mistakes

Ed Pilkington in Anchorage, Alaska
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 October 2009 12.52 BST

Conservationists fear the decision to allow Shell to drill for offshore oil in the Arctic will threaten polar bears and endangered animals. Photograph: Hans Strand/ Hans Strand/Corbis

Conservation groups based in Alaska have accused the Obama administration of repeating the mistakes of George Bush after it gave the conditional go-ahead for Shell to begin drilling offshore for oil and natural gas in the environmentally sensitive Beaufort Sea.

The Minerals Management Service, part of the federal Interior Department, yesterday gave Shell the green light to begin exploratory wells off the north coast of Alaska in an Arctic area that is home to large numbers of endangered bowhead whales and polar bears, as well as walruses, ice seals and other species. The permission would run from July to October next year, though Shell has promised to suspend operations from its drill ship from late August when local Inuit people embark on subsistence hunting.

Environmentalists condemned the decision to allow drilling, saying it would generate industrial levels of noise in the water and pollute both the air and surrounding water. Rebecca Noblin, an Alaskan specialist with the conservation group the Centre for Biological Diversity, said: “We’re disappointed to see the Obama administration taking decisions that will threaten the Arctic. It might as well have been the Bush administration.”

Whit Sheard, the Alaskan expert with the environmental group Pacific Environment, accused the US Interior Department of “again trying to implement an overly aggressive Bush-era drilling plan in one of the riskiest areas on the planet to drill”.

The question of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic was one of the controversial environmental issues that confronted the Bush administration. Its permission for exploration in the Beaufort Sea, widely condemned by environmentalists, was struck down last year by a federal court on grounds that it had failed sufficiently to consider the impacts on bowhead whales and the subsistence activities of Inuit populations.

The ruling was later set aside and Shell withdrew its drilling plans.

According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, there are between 30,000 and 50,0000 bowhead whales in the world, with up to 9,000 of them feeding in the Beaufort Sea. The whales migrate twice a year through the area and are crucial to the subsistence economy of the Inupiat people.

Whale experts warn that the bowhead stocks are sensitive to noise and could be driven further off shore by the disruption of drilling. That in turn would have an impact on their chances of survival, which have already been harmed by early side-effects of global warming.

There are also fears that any drilling could lead to oil spills which would be impossible to clean up amid the Arctic’s broken sea ice.

Shell must now satisfy the authorities that it has met air and water quality standards and safeguards for whale protection before it can begin drilling. The oil company’s head in Alaska, Pete Slaiby, said objections had been taken into account.

“We sincerely believe this exploration plan addresses concerns we have heard in the North Slope communities which have resulted in the programmes being adjusted accordingly,” he said.

EMAIL FROM JOHN DONOVAN TO SHELL ETHICS CHIEF RICHARD WISEMAN: 20 OCTOBER 2009

From: John Donovan <john@shellnews.net>
Date: 20 October 2009 15:24:44 BST
To: richard.wiseman@shell.com
Subject: Leaflets at Shell Centre (Revised email)

Dear Mr Wiseman

I understand that a Shell security guard was sent out on a mission to obtain the names of the people issuing our leaflets to Shell employees outside Shell Centre.

That can only be viewed as another act of deliberate intimidation. Why else would they be asked for their names, unless you intend putting them on your Christmas card list?

Shell senior management will not issue legal proceedings to prevent our leaflets being given out on a permanent basis, because that would be counter-productive, so you try to frighten the people handing them out. What a pathetic situation for the worlds largest company to find itself in.

You have my name and address if Shell works up the courage to have proceedings issued again against us. I suppose Shell’s track record of failing to win a single one of the eight previous actions – six in the High Court, one in the County Court and the most recent case decided unanimously in our favour by the World Intellectual Property Organisation – does give cause for some trepidation, even though your in-house army of lawyers have us outnumbered, 650 to *none.

Regards
John Donovan

*As you know, we had NO legal representation in the last case, which dragged on for months in a blaze of international publicity including coverage in the Wall Street Journal, yet Shell still managed to lose in spectacular fashion.

PS. I have, as per normal, posted a copy of this email on our website. Any reply will be added. I have also posted with it a photograph of the Shell Centre, showing two flags flying proudly atop the building. I really do think that at least one should be a pirate flag (skull and crossbones) to warn all who enter about the danger of Shell IP theft.

ANY RESPONSE FROM SHELL WILL BE POSTED HERE

We have received an automated response. Mr Wiseman is in the USA, perhaps making another speech about corruption? If so, I wonder whether it will be for or against… and will Gale Norton be in the audience?