Posts from ‘December, 2009’

Barack Obama’s administration has granted Shell the right to drill for oil in the environmentally sensitive seas off Alaska during the middle of climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

For major oil companies like Exxon, Shell, BP or Chevron, who have found it tough to increase their production and reserves on their own, big acquisitions offer a quick way to expand their operations after amassing mountains of cash in recent years.

That does not mean 5,000 employees of Shell’s 13,000 employees in the Houston area will be “transitioning” abroad, Op De Weegh said. Shell has 21,000 employees in the United States.

Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 December 2009 07.00 GMT

Shell drip-feeds its environmental ‘credentials’ to the public. Photograph: James Boardman

Editors must love Shell. Almost whatever I have read about climate change and the UN talks in Copenhagen in recent weeks, it has been flanked by the familiar Shell logo somewhere in the background.

From geeky titles like New Scientist to politico mags such as Prospect and New Statesman; and newspapers like the Guardian, the world’s second largest corporation has been splashing out – filling screens and newsprint with adverts and underwriting special supplements. Shell also sponsored a major research project by the Economist Intelligence Unit, called Countdown to Copenhagen, launched early this year at a Shell-sponsored “sustainability summit”.

Nobody is suggesting that Shell is writing the copy. And surely only the most craven editor would leave out criticism of oil companies like Shell. But the unmistakeable message is that Shell is going green.

It’s not just a subliminal message, either. The ads are all about Shell developing new low-carbon technologies, like carbon-capture, biofuels and “helping our customers use energy more efficiently”. They have pretty images, like a butterfly net catching CO2, and a pocket calculator with a button marked “less CO2″.

It won’t be easy, says the message: “We’ll need to think the impossible is possible.” Trouble is, in reality, Shell wants to think the possible is impossible. As its recently retired chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, said earlier this year of wind, solar and hydrogen power: “I don’t expect them to grow much at Shell from here.”

Back then I wrote that “Shell is the new Exxon“. But the latest evidence suggests it is worse than that. A new study of the environmental performance of the world’s top 10 oil and gas companies by the Madrid-based environmental auditing company Management & Excellence puts Shell last of all the western majors. That’s behind BP, Total, Chevron and even ExxonMobil.

Shell has fallen from fourth place to seventh in the past year, and is now propping up the bottom of the table with two Chinese oil giants, Sinopec and Petrochina, and the Russian monolith Gazprom. None are known for their environmental credentials.

The audit analyses the 10 companies according to 198 different criteria. Shell gets a rating of 51%, compared with top-ranking BP’s 77% and Exxon’s 62%.

Shell’s new chief executive Peter Voser last week made one statistical claim for his company’s progress to date. Its chemical plants were, he said, 8% more energy efficient that in 2001.

Good for them. But most other companies are doing better. The M&E study found Shell next to bottom on energy savings.

Shell failed to make the grade in other areas, too. It may spend millions promoting its expertise in alternative energy technologies, but Shell came in the bottom half here, too, with only half the scores of BP, Chevron and the Brazilian oil giant, Petrobras. Once, BP and Shell were bracketed together as companies taking the lead in expanding into renewables. But the report says that among the top 10 today “only BP seems to have a real business in alternative energies”.

Shell spokesman Shaun Wiggins said: “While Shell is aware of Management & Excellence, we have made a conscious choice to not participate in its rankings survey process.” The company says it prefers other environmental audits.

The findings will come as no surprise to those who read Friends of the Earth’s June report on Shell’s Big Dirty Secret, which charged the it with being “the world’s most carbon intensive oil company”.

Shell claims on its websites: “We were one of the first energy companies to acknowledge the threat of climate change.” The tragedy is that this is true, but that so little has come of it.

I have lost count of the number of false dawns at Shell. At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, I reported Shell scientists promising that the company was going to plant tree across the tropics to soak up carbon dioxide. Whatever happened to that idea? Just before the Kyoto climate conference in 1997, Shell announced it was making a $500m investment in solar power. By the World Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 it claimed to be installing solar panels across the developing world. Today it is absent from that business too.

Wiggins said Shell has spent $1.7bn on renewable in the past five years, but now concentrates on biofuels because they are “closest to our core business”. But he agreed that oil and gas still make up 95% of its business, and the truth is that the company has flattered to deceive for almost two decades now.

Readers of its current adverts are directed towards a zappy and visionary website devoted entirely to what might happen in the future. But the future has been a long time coming for Shell. And it seems ever further away.

SOURCE ARTICLE

Shell also said in its statement that the company had “always refrained from commenting on specific issues raised by the Donovans…” This was to put it politely, totally untrue. Shell has often supplied us with comment for publication in respect of specific issues.

By BRETT CLANTON Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

(NOW WITH AN ADDED COMMENT FROM “JO BLOW”)

Dec. 15, 2009, 8:40PM

Shell shipping Houston jobs overseas

Royal Dutch Shell has publicly announced it will slash 5,000 jobs by year end—including “hundreds” in Houston—as part of a sweeping reorganization new CEO Peter Voser said is needed to make the company more competitive.

But under a separate program, the European oil giant has been quietly transferring additional office jobs from Houston and elsewhere to India and the Philippines to reduce costs, according to internal Shell documents obtained by the Chronicle and a person familiar with the plan.

The “migration” programs affect employees in finance and other support functions, which are being consolidated in what the oil company calls “shared service centers” in low-cost countries to fit the new company structure.

They are “part of a Shell-wide effort to streamline processes and improve efficiency” and “will enable us to deliver consistently world-class service at a competitive cost,” according to a Shell Powerpoint presentation for a portion of the company’s finance division.

It’s unclear how many of Shell’s 13,000 employees in the Houston area will be affected by the migration plans. Partly, that’s because company officials are still deciding which jobs will stay or go abroad, and are rolling out the plans in phases that run into next year. But at least a few divisions in Houston are preparing to be downsized dramatically.

“People are very concerned about their future,” said a Shell finance employee, who requested anonymity for fear of losing his job.

He said about a quarter of the jobs on his team will be relocated to India in coming months and that more will follow under a final phase next year.

The salaries for the foreign jobs are a small fraction of those for similar U.S. jobs and have fewer benefits, making it impractical for many American employees to make the move, the finance employee said.

Shell officials would not comment directly on the internal company documents, nor discuss potential job losses from migration programs. But they said shared service centers in Manila are part of a broader effort to make the company more efficient and competitive.

Major oil companies including Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP have been cutting jobs, capital spending budgets and other costs in response to the global economic downturn that has sapped demand for petroleum products like gasoline and diesel fuel.

And it’s nothing new for multinational companies to move U.S. jobs to lower-wage countries to save on labor costs.

But Shell’s migration programs could have broader implications for Houston. They suggest that yet another category of well-paying jobs in the oil and gas industry is leaving the city, perhaps forever, as energy companies try to get leaner to compete.

“We talk about Houston being the energy capital of the world, but it’s lost some of that edge, especially in the manufacturing sector,” said Barton Smith, director of the University of Houston’s Institute for Regional Forecasting. “But it remains the technological center of energy and it remains, to a large extent, the financial center.”

The exit of energy finance jobs from the city would be discouraging, especially as a shortage of engineering talent has already forced the oil industry to recruit overseas, said Amy Jaffe, a senior fellow in energy studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute.

But at the same time, Shell could add other jobs to the region over time as the company develops major projects in North and South America, she said.

In fact, the region should be a “disproportionately growing part of Shell” in coming years with new projects in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil, the Canadian oil sands and natural gas fields in the U.S. and Canada, said Marvin Odum, president of the company’s U.S. division, in a recent interview with the Chronicle.

For now, however, the company is still finding its footing amid uncertainty on many fronts.

Shell, which is based in The Hague, with U.S. headquarters in Houston, has been involved in a major downsizing since Voser replaced Jeroen van der Veer as CEO in July.

By year end, the company plans to cut 5,000 employees, or 10 percent of its global workforce, under a reorganization he calls Transition 2009.

The process — which merged the company’s three upstream businesses into two, expanded its downstream group and added a new projects and technology division —trimmed management ranks by 20 percent and has forced 15,000 Shell employees to re-apply for a smaller pool of jobs.

Shell officials said that reorganization will wrap up by the end of this month.

The company has been moving on a separate track with its migration programs.

The company recently told employees within its finance division that some of their jobs are being relocated from Houston and Calgary, Alberta, to “finance operations centers” in Manila and Chennai, India.

Spokesman Bill Tanner said foreign shared service centers are key to improving the finance unit’s competitiveness. “Currently, our finance operations are too complex and too costly and this is preventing the finance function from fully contributing value to the business,” he said.

brett.clanton@chron.com

Although you say “Shell officials said that reorganization will wrap up by the end of this month.” in fact Shell CEO Peter Voser has recently warned of a further unspecified number of job cuts at Shell next year.

Posted by John Donovan of http://royaldutchshellplc.com/

SOURCE ARTICLE

Jo Blow
on Dec 18th, 2009 at 3:27 pm

Oil companies have come under pressure at Copenhagen to scale back investment in production from tar sands, as Royal Dutch Shell was branded the world’s second worst corporate lobbyist for its support of the industry.

The case follows up on a prior challenge to an earlier exploration plan proposed by Shell in 2007.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A coalition of environmental groups and Arctic communities has filed a second lawsuit aimed at blocking a Shell Oil subsidiary from drilling in the Beaufort Sea.