Comment from a former employee of Shell Oil USA

After several decades of working in the oil industry in the exploration side of the business I have learned that Murphy’s Law pretty much rules. If it can happen, it will happen. Soon or later the laws of statistics catch up with you.

Some examples are:

- $150 million wells that are supposed to be ‘sure discoveries’ are dry holes (e.g., the Mukluk prospect in Alaska).

- Gas pipelines that are not well maintained explode in the middle of residential neighborhoods (last week in California).

- A drunken (and known alcoholic) tanker captain run his ship aground in the most sensitive of environmental areas (Exxon Valdez).

- Valves that are not installed properly almost sink a production platform (BP’s Thunder Horse).

- An improperly completed well blows out sinking the poorly maintained drilling rig and causing a massive oil spill (BP’s Deep Water Horizon).

- A drilling rig on a floating barge drills into an abandoned salt mine, draining a Louisiana marsh and sucking the rig and barge into the mine (Texaco, 1980).

- Impoverished ‘natives’ seeking to survive continue to tap unburied pipelines in the Niger River Delta causing vast amounts of oil spillage and long term environmental destruction.

And so it goes. If it can happen, it will happen. Particularly if you tempt the laws of statistics.

And now Shell wants to tempt chance in the Arctic Ocean. A blow out of one of their proposed exploration wells (or even a production well if it comes to that later on) could be the ‘black swan’ event that takes Shell USA down as a company. (The 1970 Bay Marchand Gulf of Mexico blowout on a shallow water production platform comes to mind. BP is in good company.) Shell has no way of responding to such an event. The cost of the resulting cleanup would likely dwarf the cost of the BP accident in the Gulf of Mexico.

Shell USA management, in an effort to save some money, wants to drill in the Arctic with a refurbished, but antiquated drilling rig (converted Japanese log carrier launched in 1965) with no way to respond to a major ‘accident’. They have no contingency plan and have made taken no meaningful measures to prepare for a ‘major incident’.

So, the fact of the matter is that Shell USA management is willing to take a calculated risk and risk the future of the company to save a few million dollars drilling a couple of exploration wells in the most environmentally sensitive area of the planet. And they are willing to do so even after BP’s abject lesson in tempting chance.

Obviously, they have little regard for the investment of the shareholders of the company.

And we should trust the judgement of these clowns and let them drill anyway?

I don’t think so.

Comment from a Shell retiree

On blow-outs in Shell: the former employee of Shell Oil forgot a few.

Sleen (Netherlands) 1965 http://tento.nl/wetenswaardigheden/zwarte%20haantje/zwhaantje.htm Whole rig disappeared.

Using Google one can find many more and these are all by Shell. The rest of the industry is even worse. Cock-ups happen. Remember the valve that was forgotten to close on the launch of Sleipner concrete platform? It went lower into the water but unfortunately it kept going until it sank and caused a small earthquake. And another billion dollars down the drain.

So I totally agree with the previous writer, there simply is insufficient discipline and know-how around to prevent future disasters. Tough auditors are not enough rewarded and neither is plain old competence. Promises and nice presentations are rewarded much better. E&P is no longer Exploration & Production but Excel & Powerpoint. And therefore disasters will continue.

I too have missed a great many blow outs and near misses. Perhaps you can ask your readers to complete the table…

By Alfred and John Donovan

We note that our article “Royal Dutch Shell Fat Cat Malcolm Brinded: Big Brain but no scruples” published in May 2009 on Blogger News Network has now been read over 8,000 times. The outcome of a related investigation by Grampion Police into alleged corruption and HSE issues regarding Shell and the Brent Bravo explosion is still pending. Click here to read the whistleblower email which sparked the Police investigation.

Why has Shell still not taken legal action against the us or Bill Campbell, the former HSE Group Auditor of Shell International, to defend the reputation of Mr Brinded? Shell currently has 1800 in-house legal staff, including 800 lawyers. Where are they all hiding?

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion after reading Shell internal comms supplied in response to our most recent application under the Data Protection Act, that Shell management is frightened of us and at a complete loss about what to do.

The company is in such complete disarray that Shell lawyers are regularly feeding false information to Shell management about the back history of our dealings with Shell. Most recently on the Focal Point document dated 21 January 2010.

Interestedly, a salient question was posed (and answered) in that document…

Why do you not sue the Donovans for libel?

• The experience of corporate defamation plaintiffs is that, even when successful, such cases draw far more attention to the untrue allegations that they would receive without the case having been brought. However, we do not exclude this as a possibility.

In fact, SHELL HAD ALREADY EXCLUDED THAT POSSIBILITY LONG AGO, as confirmed in a Shell internal email dated 19 June 2009.

Like we said, Shell is in complete disarray…

Shell wants to go quite far, all the way to the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas of Arctic Alaska to get the oil that is there. And they want you to support them in their journey, which is why they say, “Let’s Go.”

THE HUFFINGTON POST

Subhankar Banerjee: Photographer, writer, activist, founder ClimateStoryTellers.org

Last Sunday, after I posted my most recent blog, “Climate Educators Wanted,” I visited the Green page in HuffPost. My eyes lit up. Before my eyes, the GREENscape slowly turned into a story. Stories are nothing but fragments from life put together. Here’s how this story came together.

About midway down the left column, my earlier post, “Letter to Young Americans” was still visible. Right above it was a Shell oil ad. The ad and the story each occupied an equal amount of space, so that was a good beginning. Here is a quick read: the ad says, “Let’s Go,” asking all of us to join in. The story asks all young people to join in. The ad says, “Go Further,” telling us to progress into the future. The story says, “Start the climate revolution now,” for the purpose of a brighter future. The ad and the story outwardly appear to be saying the same thing and peacefully cohabiting in the HuffPo GREENscape.

Allow me to use my wild storyteller imagination to go a little deeper. The ad says, “Let’s Make What We’ve Got.” Let’s split this in two parts. I’d say, because Shell likes to “take” more than they “make,” we can replace one with the other. And “What We’ve Got”? Oil is what we’ve got. So to get at the essence of the story, the line should read, “Let’s Take the Oil We’ve Got.” My story, on the other hand, talks about getting off of fossil fuels — oil and coal — and starting a clean energy revolution. So you see, in spite of the superficial similarities, the ad and the story are actually heading down two different roads. As poet Robert Frost wrote,

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

It’s time that we also take the road less traveled — the one with a clean energy future.

About the oil that we’ve got. Resource expert Michael Klare keeps pointing out that there is no easy oil anymore, only extreme energy in faraway places like the Arctic or in deep oceans. And it comes to us with great devastation.

That’s why Shell wants to “Go Further,” literally–in distance, not in time. Actually Shell wants to go quite far, all the way to the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas of Arctic Alaska to get the oil that is there. And they want you to support them in their journey, which is why they say, “Let’s Go.”

As it happens, Shell was ready to start drilling this past July in America’s Arctic Seas. But BP’s deadly oil-and-methane spill in the Gulf of Mexico put a kibosh on that plan. On May 25, I wrote a piece titled, “BPing the Arctic? Will the Obama Administration Allow Shell Oil to Do to the Arctic What BP did to the Gulf?” which was first posted in TomDispatch.com and then in numerous progressive outlets around the world, including HuffPost, and was also translated in other languages. I’ll not repeat what I said there; I hope you’ll take a look, but here is the last line:

“It’s time to put a stop to Shell’s drilling plan in America’s Arctic Ocean for this summer — and all the summers to come.”

On May 27, President Obama suspended Shell’s Arctic drilling plan for 2010. So I thought that this particular story had ended for the year and we’ll reopen it again next year. But like all good stories, it became more like a large onion with many layers to peel.

Back to the HuffPo GREENscape. I saw that, two columns to the right and about an inch down, there was a news story with title, Alaska Sues Feds to Lift Arctic Drilling Suspension. Here is how that story came to life. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar visited Arctic Alaska at the beginning of this month. His itinerary included a town hall meeting in Barrow (the northernmost Inupiat community in Alaska), a stop at the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, and a flight over the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. Then on Sept. 4, there appeared a story in the Los Angeles Times with a headline that read, “Salazar: Arctic oil drilling must wait.” In that piece you’ll see my polar bear photo with the Beaufort Sea in the background, one of the two Arctic seas that Shell wants to drill for oil. But of course the story couldn’t end there, either.

There is a lot of money at stake for Shell. They have already spent more than $2 billion in lease sale and probably several hundred million already in other operations and PR in the Arctic communities and outside. Did Shell arm-twist the Alaska state government? From my decade-long experience working on Arctic Alaska issues, all I can say is — most likely. So there you have it. The State of Alaska is so willing to allow Shell to go drill in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas that it sues the Feds to lift the Arctic offshore drilling ban.

Back to the ad: Shell wants to “Go Further.” As it happens, Shell has actually gone very far. Perhaps not as far as Star Trek’s famous where no man has gone before, but quite close — all the way to Sakhalin Island, on the Sea of Okhotsk in Far Eastern Siberia, to drill for oil.

I’ve also been to Far Eastern Siberia, to the Yakutia province, the largest sub-national entity in the world. But I’ve never been to Sakhalin in person. However, I’ve been there through stories told by none other than the master storyteller Anton Chekov. In 1890, Chekov made a seven-months-long journey to the Tsarist penal colony on Sakhalin Island. Chekov’s journey was so amazing that he regularly wrote home about it. His book, Sakhalin Island, is now considered a masterpiece of world literature.

Shell’s journey to Sakhalin, on the other hand, is something no one would want to write home about. As a storyteller I believe in retelling stories again and again, because stories keep a culture alive. So here are some fragments from stories told by others about Shell’s journey to the Sakhalin.

“The oil pipeline will cross over 1,000 wild rivers and tributaries, many of them important to salmon spawning. In addition, despite public protests, a million tons of dredging waste has already been dumped into Aniva Bay – an area crucial to the livelihood of the island’s indigenous community – and has led to the destruction of the local fishery. To make matters worse, an oil platform is being built at the very spot off Sakhalin where the last 100 critically endangered Western Pacific gray whales feed. By Shell’s own estimates, there is a 24 percent chance that there will be a major oil spill during the life of the 40-year project.” Claude Martin, The New York Times, December 2, 2005.

Things actually got really bad for Shell in Sakhalin. When Shell bought the Sakhalin leases in 1996, the price of oil was $22 a barrel and so little attention was paid. But five or six years ago, as the price of oil went through the roof, everyone began paying attention, including Mr. Vladimir Putin. Moscow sided with the Sakhalin Island environmentalists, and there was even a threat of a $50 billion lawsuit against Shell. In 2007, Shell was forced to give up half of its control of the Sakhalin operation to the Russian energy giant Gazprom. This story was reported in CNNMoney.com. One thing that stood out for me in that story was a comment by a Sakhalin local: “The company did everything that was good for them and not good for us.”

As I was wrapping up this story, the following news came in, in a story called Melting sea ice forces walruses ashore in Alaska:

Tens of thousands of walruses have come ashore in northwest Alaska because the sea ice they normally rest on has melted. Scientists with two federal agencies are most concerned about the one-ton female walruses stampeding and crushing each other and their smaller calves near Point Lay, Alaska, on the Chukchi Sea. The federal government is in a year-long process to determine if walruses should be put on the endangered species list. — Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, September 13, 2010.

The news hit me like a rock. I have spent much time in Point Lay, an Inupiat community, and have walked some of the barrier islands where these walruses are probably jammed together right now. These animals are already seriously stressed by climate change, and now Shell wants to go drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea.

None of this bodes well for Shell’s drilling plan in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas of Arctic Alaska.

It’s time Shell gave up on their hope to drill in America’s Arctic Ocean and started spending their money to build a clean energy economy and create real jobs right here in America. Then we’ll surely write home about “Shell’s Journey to the Clean Energy Future,” and we’ll take Shell’s “Let’s Go” to heart. This will surely “Go Further” into a cleaner future for all life. Who knows? Like Chekov’s book, such a story could eventually become a masterpiece as well.

But until then, we must stop Shell’s plan to drill in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas of America’s Arctic, no matter how many “Let’s Go” ads they place in the HuffPo GREENscape.

Copyright 2010 Subhankar Banerjee

SOURCE ARTICLE

Mr Putin cited the successful participation of Shell in the Sakhalin-2 project, as well as its cooperation with Gazprom, Gazpromneft, Rosneft and other Russian companies. In turn, Mr Voser called Russia a key investment partner and expressed satisfaction with the results that have been achieved through cooperation with Russia in a variety of sectors.

17 Sept 2010: Transcript of the beginning of the meeting:

Vladimir Putin: Mr Voser, Shell has been operating in Russian for a long time and with good results. You have several major joint ventures with local partners, including the ambitious Sakhalin-2 project. Last year, we launched the first Russian gas liquefaction company as part of this project. And I must say that in this area, in hydrocarbons, in particular for the production and sale of gas, we have our own plans, which are to increase the production and export of LPG – up to 10% of our total exports by 2020 and up to 15% by 2030.

You have good relationships and business contacts with a number of our leading companies – Gazprom, Gazpromneft, Rosneft and other companies. You are generating new businesses, and the latest, I believe, is the production of lubricants in the Tver region.

We know about your initiatives for environment protection, especially after the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. We are ready to develop relations with you along existing lines and in new and promising initiatives. What’s more – as we all know- despite all the attention, the necessary and needed attention, to alternative energy sources, according to leading experts and professionals, the need for hydrocarbons in the coming decades will only grow.

And we look forward to further cooperation with you in Russia and third countries on spot transactions, and share swaps between our companies – in short, we anticipate long-term, collaborative, positive and large-scale work.

Peter Voser (as translated): Thank you for the opportunity to meet today! This is my second time in Sochi. As you know, I’ve been in this position for a year now. For me, it is a great pleasure to visit Sochi again, and to remember my first trip when I was chief financial officer.

For us, Russia is a key investment partner, a key investment company. I am very pleased with the successful results we have achieved with Russia in many sectors.

You have already mentioned the Sakhalin-2 project, and I am very glad that we are able to cooperate with Gazprom on liquefied gas exports.

And as for the Salym project in Western Siberia, I am very proud of the results that have been achieved. I also hope that there will be new opportunities in the future.

We’re already working in the field of natural resources, and we work together with our consumers. You already mentioned the lubricant manufacturing company, which will be launched in 2011. This is a very big investment – we have invested heavily in this project. This is the first project of its kind in Europe for Shell. And we are glad that there will be Shell products made in Russia.

I would like to invite you to open the plant next year.

Vladimir Putin: Thank you very much. I’ll surely attend.

This is truly a milestone for this region of the country – new production and new jobs. I hope this venture, as well as others you may set up in Russia, will be successful, as well as the Sakhalin-2 project. Last year Sakhalin-2 produced 50% more liquefied gas than planned.

SOURCE ARTICLE

New York Law Journal

Mark Hamblett September 20, 2010

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected outright Friday the theory that corporations can be held liable in the United States under the Alien Tort Statute for violations of international law in foreign countries.

In a sweeping decision rebuffing a lawsuit against The Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. and others for allegedly aiding and abetting human rights violations during oil exploration in Nigeria, the court declared that “corporate liability is not a discernible — much less universally recognized — norm of customary international law that we may apply pursuant to ATS (Alien Tort Statute).”

Judge Dennis Jacobs joined Judge Jose A. Cabranes’ 50-page majority opinion in settling an open question in the circuit. Judge Pierre Leval concurred only in the judgment as he issued an 88-page opinion of his own saying the majority opinion “deals a substantial blow to international law and its undertaking to protect fundamental human rights.”

The court in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell, 06-4800-cv, affirmed the dismissal of several claims by Southern District of New York Judge Kimba Wood but also said that the remaining claims, including aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, should be thrown out as well.

Plaintiffs were Nigerian citizens who claimed that Dutch, British and Nigerian corporations should be held liable for human rights violations committed by the Nigerian military with the companies’ assistance, including attacks on people in the Ogoni region who were protesting the environmental effects of oil exploration in the area.

They claimed the companies provided transport to the troops, allowed company property to be used as staging areas for attacks and provided food to the soldiers and paid them. The plaintiffs sued for torture, extrajudicial killing and other violations under the Alien Tort Statute, 28 U.S.C. §1350, which imposes liability for a “violation of the law of nations.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on the issue of corporate liability under the statute, which was passed in 1789 to allow non-U.S. citizens to seek redress in American courts for violations of the law of nations such as piracy, attacks on ambassadors and violations of the rights of safe passage.

But the Supreme Court has rarely addressed the statute, which Judge Cabranes said lay “dormant” until it was revived by the 2nd Circuit in 1980, when it ruled U.S. courts could entertain a foreign citizen’s suit claiming torture in a foreign country in Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, 630 F.2d 876 (1980).

Many lower courts have assumed that there can be corporate liability under the statute but that will change following Friday’s decision.

On Friday, Cabranes wrote that the circuit was holding that, under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 542 U.S. 692 (2004), and the 2nd Circuit’s own precedents over the past 30 years, “in ATS suits alleging violations of customary international law, the scope of liability — who is liable for what — is determined by customary international law itself.”

“Because customary international law consists of only those norms that are specific, universal, and obligatory in the relations of the State inter se, and because no corporation has ever been subject to any form of liability (whether civil or criminal) under the customary international law of human rights,” Cabranes said, the court lacks jurisdiction under the ATS.

The judge said, “A legal culture long accustomed to imposing liability in corporations may, at first blush, assume that corporations must be subject to liability under the ATS, just as corporations are generally liable in tort under our domestic law,” but the ATS only opens up liability for violations of international law.

“By conferring subject matter jurisdiction over a limited number of offenses defined by international law, the ATS requires federal courts to look beyond the rules of domestic law — however well-established they may be — to examine the specific and universally accepted rules that the nations of the world treat as binding in their dealings with one another.”

PURSUE INDIVIDUALS

The judge said “the singular achievement” of international law since World War II has been in the area of human rights, where the subjects of international law now include not merely states, but also individuals.”

Beginning with the Nuremberg trials, he said, the guiding principle has been to focus “not on abstract entities” but on the individual men and women who have committed international crimes such as war crimes, genocide and torture.

He said customary international law “has steadfastly rejected the notion of corporate liability for international crimes, and no international tribunal has ever held a corporation liable for a violation of the law of nations.”

Cabranes noted “nothing in this opinion limits or forecloses suits under the ATS against the individual perpetrators of violations of customary international law — including the employees, managers, officer, and directors of a corporation — as well as anyone who purposefully aids and abets a violation of customary international law.”

Paul Hoffman of Schonbrun DeSimone Seplow Harris Hoffman & Harrison in Venice, Calif., argued for the plaintiffs.

Rowan D. Wilson of Cravath, Swaine & Moore argued for the defendants.

Jonathan Drimmer of Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C., who lectures on the Alien Tort Statute at Georgetown Law School and advises multinational corporations on complying with the ATS, said, “This is a major decision that is going to knock down corporate ATS actions, obviously in the 2nd Circuit, but it will also have broad-reaching application outside the circuit.”

Drimmer, who was not involved in this case, said, “You read the decision, and, if you accept the premise that it is international law that governs the question, then the analysis seems pretty persuasive.”

Ralph Steinhardt, a professor at George Washington Law School who served as co-counsel in the Sosa case, said there are a number of previous decisions that “would not have been possible” without the assumption that corporations can be held liable under the ATS.

This issue “has thrown the circuit into disarray,” said Steinhardt, who is not involved in this case. “Filartiga itself, the fountainhead of ATS litigation, would have been impossible if Judge [Irving] Kaufman had looked to other examples of torturers being held civilly liable. Filartiga understood that the law of nations had changed.”

Steinhardt said “at a minimum, the 2nd Circuit needs to hear this en banc to try and bring some order out of this chaos.”

SOURCE ARTICLE

Fri Sept 17, 2010 2:08pm EDT

* Corporations not liable for rights violations -court

* Dissenting opinion calls it blow to international law

* Case involves Nigerians executed over 1990s protests (Adds Alien Tort expert says strong dissent suggests further appeal likely)

By Grant McCool

NEW YORK, Sept 17 (Reuters) – A U.S. Appeals Court on Friday dismissed a case against Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSa.L) in which the oil company was accused of helping Nigerian authorities violently suppress protests against oil exploration in the 1990s.

Judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York ruled that until the Supreme Court deemed otherwise, corporations could not be held liable in U.S. courts for violations of international human rights law.

One judge on the three-member appeals court panel wrote a strong dissent of the majority opinion, calling it “a substantial blow to international law.”

The case was brought under a 1789 U.S. statute, the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) by families of seven Nigerians who were executed by a former military government for protesting Shell’s exploration and development.

Shell has denied allegations of involvement in human rights abuses.

Jonathan Drimmer, a partner of Steptoe & Johnson LLP in Washington and an authority on the statute, said the strong dissent suggests that there will be a further appeal.

Drimmer said the ruling’s impact would be confined to those against corporations in the same court.

“Will it result in the conclusion of those lawsuits? It’s going to depend on each individual case,” Drimmer said.

One of those is a complaint seeking to hold corporations such as Ford Motor Co (F.N), General Motors Co [GM.UL] and International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) liable for aiding and abetting authorities in South Africa under apartheid — the decades-long system of racial segregation and suppression of the black majority by the white minority rulers until the early 1990s.

The accusations against Shell included violations connected with the 1995 hangings of prominent activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other protesters by Nigeria’s then-military government.

The families had sought to make the company the first foreign corporation found liable in a U.S. court for aiding human rights violations abroad under the ATS.

Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs and Judge Jose Cabranes said in a written ruling that the trial judge, who declined to dismiss some claims against Shell, should have thrown out all claims.

The opinion noted that no corporation has ever been subject to any form of civil or criminal liability under the international law of human rights.

“We hold that corporate liability is not a discernible — much less universally recognized — norm of customary international law that we may apply pursuant to the ATS.

“Accordingly, plaintiffs’ ATS claims must be dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction,” the 138-page ruling said in part.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Pierre Leval wrote:

“According to the rule my colleagues have created, one who earns profits by commercial exploitation of abuse of fundamental human rights can successfully shield those profits from victims’ claims for compensation simply by taking the precaution of conducting the heinous operation in the corporate form.”

The cases are Wiwa et al v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co et al, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 96-08386 and Nos. 06-4800 and 06-4876 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

(Reporting by Grant McCool; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Richard Chang)

REUTERS ARTICLE

By Elisha Bala-Gbogbo – Sep 17, 2010 3:01 PM GMT+0100

Both oil concern BP and Royal Dutch Shell have been crossed off the list of most sustainable companies, writes the Dutch financial daily Financieele Dagblad on Friday based on the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes Review 2010.

Published on : 17 September 2010 – 12:00pm | By Sophie van Leeuwen (Photo: EPA/ANP)

The oil leaks in Nigeria are comparable to the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Both oil concern BP and Royal Dutch Shell have been crossed off the list of most sustainable companies, writes the Dutch financial daily Financieele Dagblad on Friday based on the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes Review 2010.

The authors of the index want to speak with one voice. If BP is to be removed from the index, than Shell should be too, reports the newspaper, quoting anonymous sources. In a reaction, a Shell spokesperson said he is surprised.

“If this has anything to do with Nigeria, it would be very undeserved,” he said. “The situation in Nigeria cannot be compared to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in any way. In the last five years time Shell spilled 15,000 barrels of oil in Nigeria; BP lost millions of barrels. We are awaiting complete clarity about on Dow Jones’ reasoning.”

SOURCE ARTICLE

COMMENT FROM A SHELL RETIREE

Shell says themselves they no longer are on the Dow Jones index for sustainability. Main reason apparently the bad behaviour in Nigeria and all the flaring they do.

I arrived in Nigeria after the famous ‘Decree 99’ was issued, ‘Thou shalt not flare’. Shell was very worried that the Nigerian government meant this seriously. But soon they found escapes and over the years have informed own staff and the rest of the world that they would stop flaring in the late 90s, then 2004, then 2008 and now it is 2010 and they are still flaring at a massive scale.

Whatever the excuses, the fact is they do flare obscene amounts of gas.

17 September 2010

AMSTERDAM — Royal Dutch Shell PLC says it has agreed to sell its stake in the Statfjord oil field in the Norwegian North Sea and several related assets to Centrica Resources AS for $225 million.

Shell remains active in several other projects in Norway, including some that are still being built. Friday’s deal must be approved by regulators.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Source Article