Bu Alfred Donovan and John Donovan

We recently published an article in which Shell was praised for setting up this website: Shell Actually Implements a Blog!

Dow Jones Newswires has also described royaldutchshellplc.com as the “company web site”

Now the Asian Tribune has described us as “an international news website of Royal Dutch Shell Plc”

We thought that it was obvious from the content that it is not a Royal Dutch Shell owned website, but it seems we will have to try harder.

Some confusion may have arisen from the following endorsement of the Donovan’s and the Shell Blog by a hapless Shell official:

Their website, royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out.

(Extract from a Shell internal email dated 20 March 2007 from which some information was redacted to protect privacy)

Posted on Shell Blog by “old nigeria hand” on Sunday Nov 14th, 2010 at 11:26 pm

RESPONSE TO: What did Shell Oil President John Hofmeister know about corruption in Nigeria?

Panalpina and Hofmeister, bribes in Nigeria. I am certain that the top management knew all about the goings on. About 5 years ago a scandal nearly erupted but was quenched. (Or as the say in Nigeria: ‘de disting was quench-oh by de Oga’.

SPDC had made around 500 million dollars disappear over the years to all kind of community projects. No trails could be found in the books. And this for a company that should be able to trace every dollar spent anywhere. Because it is shareholder’s or taxpayer’s money. So I am sure that Hofmeister et all just assumed the bribes via Panalpina would disappear in the great wash. I am not an accountant. But as an engineer I know we can and must and do certify for instance every weld on long pipelines. The exact location, date of weld, weldingrods used, name of welder, and an X-ray photo is included. If you can do that, you should be able to trace every dollar spent? Unless you don’t want to?!?

Related MSNBC Article

Big oil company Royal Dutch Shell of Britain and the Netherlands, along with an exploration subsidiary, agreed to relinquish about $18 million in profits and interest. In addition, Shell Nigerian Exploration and Production Co. Ltd. will pay a $30 million criminal fine.

By MARCY GORDON

The Associated Press

updated 11/4/2010 11:00:51 PM ET

Royal Dutch Shell, others pay $236M in bribe cases

WASHINGTON — Seven companies — Royal Dutch Shell PLC, a big Swiss freight company, four oil service companies and a U.S. shipping firm — have agreed to pay $236.5 million to settle criminal and civil charges that they bribed foreign officials, the government announced Thursday.

The companies were accused of paying customs officials in a dozen countries millions of dollars in exchange for favorable treatment in customs duties, imports and taxes. In addition, they allegedly also paid bribes to get phony documents enabling oil drilling rigs to be brought in to countries.

The companies agreed to pay $156.5 million in criminal fines to settle proceedings with the Justice Department, and about $80 million in civil fines and restitution to settle related charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SEC officials said the agency’s cases constituted its first “sweep” of a specific industry sector to crack down on public companies and third parties that are paying bribes abroad.

Big oil company Royal Dutch Shell of Britain and the Netherlands, along with an exploration subsidiary, agreed to relinquish about $18 million in profits and interest. In addition, Shell Nigerian Exploration and Production Co. Ltd. will pay a $30 million criminal fine.

In court documents filed in Houston, Panalpina World Transport (Holding) Ltd., of Basel, Switzerland, and its U.S. subsidiary agreed to criminal fines of almost $70.6 million. The company also will give up $11.3 million in profits to settle with the SEC. Panalpina acknowledged paying $27 million in bribes from 2002 to 2007 to officials of Angola, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Russia and Turkmenistan.

The oil service companies are Houston-based Pride International Inc., Swiss firm Noble Corp., and Transocean Inc. and GlobalSantaFe Corp., both based in the Cayman Islands. The shipping firm is New Orleans-based Tidewater Inc.

The other countries involved were said to be India, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Mexico and Venezuela.

The settlements marked the latest action in the government’s efforts to combat overseas corruption in international business. The bribery charges were brought under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it unlawful to bribe foreign government officials or company executives to secure or retain business. A number of U.S. and foreign companies have been charged with violating the law in recent years.

“Bribing customs officials is not only illegal but also bad for business, as the coordinated efforts of law enforcement increase the risk of detection every day,” SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami said in a statement. “These companies resorted to lucrative arrangements behind the scenes to obtain phony paperwork and special favors, and they landed themselves squarely in investigators’ crosshairs.”

Also in the new settlements:

—Pride International agreed to pay about $23.5 million in restitution; the company and its Pride Forasol subsidiary are paying a $32.6 million criminal fine.

—Tidewater: around $8 million in restitution and a $217,000 civil fine. Subsidiary Tidewater Marine International: a $7.3 million criminal fine.

—Transocean: about $7.3 million in restitution. Transocean Inc. and Transocean Ltd.: a $13.4 million criminal fine.

—GlobalSantaFe: about $3.7 million in restitution and a $2.1 million civil fine.

—Noble: about $5.6 million in restitution and a $2.6 million criminal fine.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Report from US environment group warns that ice, freezing temperatures and high seas would overwhelm any clean-up attempts

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent

Thursday 11 November 2010 10.31 GMT

The Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Photograph: Doug Wilson/Corbis

The next big offshore oil disaster could take place in the remote Arctic seas where hurricane-force winds, 30ft seas, sub-zero temperatures and winter darkness would overwhelm any clean-up attempts, a new report warns.

With the ban on offshore drilling lifted in the Gulf of Mexico, big oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell are pressing hard for the Obama administration to grant final approval to Arctic drilling. Shell has invested more than $2bn to drill off Alaska’s north coast, and is campaigning to begin next summer.

But the report, Oil spill prevention and response in the US Arctic Ocean, by the Pew Environment Group, warns that oil companies are not ready to deal with a spill, despite the lessons of the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

“There is a lot of pressure by Shell to drill this summer,” Marilyn Heiman, director of the US Arctic programme at Pew said. “But the oil companies are just not prepared for the Arctic. The spill plans are thoroughly inadequate.”

It took BP three months to bring its ruptured well under control. The former chief executive, Tony Hayward, admitted this week that the company had to improvise its response plan as it went along.

Trying to clean up a spill in the extreme conditions of the Arctic would be on an entirely different order of magnitude. “The risks, difficulties, and unknowns of oil exploration in the Arctic … are far greater than in any other area,” the report said.

The consequences for the Arctic’s environment would be dire, it said, wiping out populations of walrus, seal and polar bear and destroying the isolated indigenous communities that depend on hunting to survive.

Getting to the scene of a spill would be a challenge. The nearest major port, Dutch Harbor, is 1,300 nautical miles away from the drilling areas in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, and what few air landing strips exist are not connected to any road system. There are no coast guard vessels in either sea, and the nearest coast guard station is 950 miles by air away in Kodiak Alaska.

Response teams would confront gale-force winds, massive blocks of ice and turbulent seas, total darkness for six weeks of the year, and extreme cold. Cranes would freeze and chemical dispersants, such as those used to break up the BP spill, might not work.

Then there is the ice. Left undetected, a pipeline leak could spread oil beneath the surface of sea ice. Ice floes could carry oil hundreds of miles away from the source. At freeze-up, oil can become trapped within ice within the space of four hours, remaining there until spring. If it becomes trapped within multi-year ice, oil could stay in the environment for years, or even a decade, the report said.

Pew and other environment groups this week ramped up their campaigns on offshore drilling, taking out full-page advertisements in gulf newspapers calling on the Senate to pass tougher offshore drilling regulations when it returns for its lame-duck session next week.

An oil spill bill passed in the house last summer, but has stalled in the Senate amid strong objection from the oil industry to provisions that would lift the current $75m cap on liability.

There is also increasing concern that the interior secretary, Ken Salazar, will lift the hold placed on Arctic drilling permits after the oil disaster in the gulf.

The report does not call for a complete ban on Arctic drilling, but it recommends far more extensive study of the potential environmental impacts of a spill before industry is allowed to go-ahead. “We need to take a surgical approach and see what areas should and should not be allowed,” said Heiman.

The report also says that any spill response has to be tailored to the extreme Arctic conditions, and that oil companies be required to real-life test runs of their containment efforts.

“We can’t be training them the moment the oil hits the water and the ground like we did in the Gulf,” Heiman said. “There is much more work that needs to be done to protect the Arctic.”

GUARDIAN ARTICLE

By a former employee of Shell Oil USA

The Panalpina investigation began in 2007. The investigation covers the time period of 2002 -2007. That means, of course, that Shell’s transgressions occurred during John Hofmeister’s term of service at Shell. One has to wonder what his involvement in the bribery schemes were. I am certain that he was fully aware of what was going on, given that he was President of Shell USA from 2005 -2008. Someone had to ‘sign for’ and approve the millions of dollars used for that purpose.

It does seem that Mr. Hofmeister, and other senior management at Shell USA, may not have much regard for the law. Espionage and bribery? Is anyone really surprised by such revelations?

Ah, the contemptuous arrogance of Shell management, and big oil in general. You gotta’ love those guys. They think the law was meant for, as one of BP’s executives recently said, ‘the little people’.

Royal Dutch Shell Panalpina Nigerian Corruption Scandal

By Alfred Donovan and John Donovan

ROYAL DUTCH SHELL NAZI SECRETS

Displayed right is an article from the Dutch newspaper “Limburger Koerier”, headlined “SIR HENRI DETERDING”, plus a related receipt/note, both displayed on page 480 of “A History of Royal Dutch Shell” Vol 1.

Related text printed on the same page.

This extract from the Limburger Koerier of  29 December 1932 was only one of the many articles in the national and international press speculating about who might be funding the Nazi party, which was deeply in debt. Deterding’s name came up more than once.

The cutting is exactly as shown, with the rest of the article missing, conveniently, just when the name “Sir Hen” appears.

The headline states:

“SIR HENRI DETERDING

Sponsor of the German National Socialists?”

Sir Henri was the founder of the Royal Dutch Shell Group, which injected massive funds into the Nazis regime soon after its inception and right up to the start of World War 2.

The financial support and political backing provided by Deterding and Royal Dutch Shell may well have changed the course of history.

The article revealed that the Nazi party was 12 million marks in debt.

It then listed examples of extravagant spending by Hitler and his private army of tens of thousands. It mentions expensive houses and cars, horse riding, air travel and expensive hotels. The article goes on to speculate who was funding it all. It mentions foreign great industrialists contributing to Hitler’s political AND military organization.

The part substantiating the headline and sub-headline, which suggests exactly who was behind the funding, has been judiciously removed/censored by an unknown party.

We have already provided volumes of evidence confirming who was the main corporate sponsor of Hitler and the Nazi party: Royal Dutch Shell during and after the reign of Sir Henri Deterding.

Royal Dutch Shell and the Nazis Part 5: Evidence of Shell/Deterding financial support for the Nazis

Related article: Shell boasted about the money it pumped into Nazi Germany

ARTICLE ENDS

The quoted text shown in red and associated receipt and newspaper article are all displayed on page 480 of “A History of Royal Dutch Shell” Vol 1: “From Challenger to Joint Industry Leader 1890 -1939” by Joost Jonker & Luiten van Zanden published in the UK in 2007 by Oxford University Press.

November 12, 2010 9:30am

by Sheila McNulty

While Royal Dutch Shell waits to hear from the US government on whether it will be permitted to drill in Alaska next year, environmentalists are stepping up their campaign for a “no” vote.

The Pew Environment Group is the latest to speak out against drilling in the arctic. It has released the most comprehensive analysis done on the challenges to preventing and containing spills in the area. Highlights include noting that darkness, extreme weather and shifting sea ice could delay efforts to stop an oil blowout in the US Arctic Ocean for six months or more.

…if Shell is willing to bet its reputation – and the industry’s access to the Arctic – on its belief that it can drill there safely, then it probably can. But that does not mean an accident is not going to happen.

FULL FT ARTICLE

“There is a lot of pressure by Shell to drill this summer,” Marilyn Heiman, director of the US Arctic programme at Pew said. “But the oil companies are just not prepared for the Arctic. The spill plans are thoroughly inadequate.”

U.S. Coast Guard Ice Breaker Healy in U.S. Arctic Waters

© USGS

Oil Spill Prevention and Response in the U.S. Arctic Ocean: Unexamined Risks, Unacceptable Consequences details major gaps in response planning and Arctic marine ecosystem science. Government and industry oil spill response plans fail to account for the region’s remoteness and harsh conditions and fail to protect the fragile Arctic marine ecosystems and food webs that support walrus, polar bears and other marine mammals found nowhere else in the United States.

Report

Oil Spill Prevention and Response in the U.S. Arctic Ocean: Unexamined Risks, Unacceptable Consequences

Download PDF >

About the Report Authors >

REPORT DETAILS

The purpose of this report is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the difficulties of drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean. The report identifies several major challenges to responding to and cleaning up oil spills in the Arctic. These challenges include remoteness (almost no roads or docks, minimal response manpower), extreme conditions (shifting sea ice, fog, 20 foot seas, hurricane force winds) and the reality that standards are not in place to ensure that a catastrophic spill can be contained and controlled or that fragile Arctic shorelines will be protected.

• The Arctic Ocean is a vital ecosystem for unique species found nowhere else in the US: polar bears, ice seal species, walrus, bowhead whales, and myriad fish and bird species. This ecosystem and its iconic species already are under strain from climate change. Even a moderate-sized spill that occurs in an area where sensitive or threatened species are concentrated could have devastating effects.
• Approximately 8,000 people live in this area, and depend on marine mammals and fish for as much as 60 percent of their diet. A reduction in the availability or safety of subsistence foods could have a profound impact on both the economy and culture of Arctic communities.
• Shifting sea ice, high seas, brutal winds and sub-zero temperatures could shut down spill response any time of the year. Even if drilling were limited to open-water season, a blowout that occurred late in the fall could continue for eight or nine months if a relief drill could not be completed before the ice pack moved in.

Policy Recommendations

Policy Recommendations:Oil Spill Prevention and Response in the Arctic Ocean

Download PDF >

Policy Recommendations Overview >

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS OVERVIEW

The Arctic Ocean presents unique challenges to oil and gas drilling that should not be underestimated. Before exploration and production drilling proceeds in Arctic waters, the Department of the Interior and other agencies must assure that there are requirements in place to control and contain a spill in Arctic marine conditions and to protect the fragile ocean and coastal ecosystems. The key issues that must be addressed include:

1. the need for research and data collection to provide an understanding of Arctic species, ecosystems and environmental conditions, and the impacts of oil spills in that environment;
2. the need for candid risk assessments and imposition of risk prevention measures;
3. identification of the response gap (shortfalls in spill response systems) and spill prevention measures that must be in place to mitigate that response gap.
4. enhanced and vigilant oversight by government agencies and citizens to reduce the possibility of oil spills.

Media Coverage: Arctic Oil Spill Report

“Almost everyone can agree that, however bad the Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was, a major spill in an icy Arctic sea would be worse. How much worse? A new report commissioned by the Pew Environment Group tries to examine that question, and the answer is: Get ready for a cleanup that could take years.”

– LOS ANGELES TIMES

“Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the U.S. incident commander for the BP oil spill, said the Pew report makes valid points about response limitations in the Arctic.

“Traditional oil-spill containment equipment used elsewhere could fail in the Arctic, said Allen, who reviewed the report. ‘You can’t boom an oil spill when the water’s frozen,’ he told Reuters in a telephone interview.”

– REUTERS

“There is a lot of pressure by Shell to drill this summer,” Marilyn Heiman, director of the US Arctic programme at Pew said. “But the oil companies are just not prepared for the Arctic. The spill plans are thoroughly inadequate.”

– THE GUARDIAN

SOURCE

By Ben Sharples and Gemma Daley: November 12, 2010, 12:35 AM EST

Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) — Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil company, won approval from the Australian government to proceed with the development of the world’s first liquefied natural gas project using a floating plant.

Prelude, located about 200 kilometers (120 miles) off the coast of Western Australia, was approved with “strict conditions,” Environment Minister Tony Burke said in a statement today. The Hague-based Shell must comply with 13 requirements to protect the marine ecosystem and minimize the risk of oil spills.

Shell plans to use what will be the world’s biggest ship to tap fields in the Browse basin off Australia’s northwest coast, where more than a third of the nation’s known offshore gas is located. Prelude is among A$200 billion ($198 billion) of proposed LNG developments in the country seeking to take advantage of increasing Asian demand for cleaner-burning fuels.

“It is going to be a game changer,” said Tony Regan, a consultant at Singapore-based Tri-Zen International, who previously worked for Shell’s LNG business. If Shell goes ahead with Prelude it’s “going to be a great seal of approval on the concept of floating LNG technology.”

A development decision on Prelude is expected in 2011, Shell spokeswoman Claire Wilkinson said by phone from Perth today. Chilling gas to liquid form on floating facilities has yet to be deployed commercially. Inpex Corp. of Japan and Australia’s Santos Ltd. are among companies investigating the technology.

Development Design

Shell is in the engineering and design phase for the Prelude project, Australia country chair Ann Pickard said in a separate statement. Environmental approval is an important step, she said.

“Floating LNG technology reduces the project’s cost and environmental footprint,” Pickard said. “It removes the need for offshore compression platforms, long pipelines to shore, near-shore works such as dredging and jetty construction, and onshore development.”

Shell has ordered 10 of the $5 billion floating production vessels, which are almost 50 percent larger than a U.S. aircraft carrier. The company expects to begin production in 2016 at Prelude.

The ships will weigh about 600,000 metric tons and be around 480 meters long, 75 meters wide, and are designed to withstand a “one-in-10,000-year” tropical cyclone, Shell Executive Director for international exploration and production, Malcolm Brinded, said last year.

Oil Spill Plan

“Shell must develop an oil spill contingency plan, to the government’s satisfaction, specifying how it will minimize the risks of” leaks, Environment Minister Burke said. “Should such an accident occur, the company will pay for any environmental rehabilitation needed.”

The Australian government deferred a decision on Shell’s Prelude gas venture four times. Floating LNG technology is aimed at developing gas deposits too small or too far from the coast to be profitably exploited through onshore plants.

Prelude is expected to produce about 3.6 million metric tons of LNG annually and 1.3 million metric tons of condensate, a type of light oil, Shell spokeswoman Wilkinson said. The company needs approvals for production licenses before a development decision can be made, she said.

LNG is natural gas chilled to minus 161 degrees Celsius (minus 258 Fahrenheit) reducing it to liquid form one-six- hundredth of its original volume, so it can be transported by ship to destinations unconnected by pipeline. On arrival, it’s turned back into gas for distribution to power plants and households.

–With assistance from James Paton in Sydney. Editors: Aaron Sheldrick, John Viljoen.

To contact the reporters on this story: Ben Sharples in Melbourne at bsharples@bloomberg.net Gemma Daley in Canberra at gdaley@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Amit Prakash at aprakash1@bloomberg.net.

November 11, 2010, 5:43 pm

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

An image of a an oil-spill response vessel from a Shell commercial promoting Arctic drilling.

Now that the moratorium on deepwater oil and gas drilling has been lifted by the Obama administration, the battle for the Arctic is heating up again.

The suspension on deep-sea drilling was of course a reaction to the disastrous blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that produced the biggest offshore oil spill in the nation’s history, gushing from April to July. The moratorium was lifted last month, about six weeks before a Nov. 30 expiration date.

As soon as it was lifted, my colleague Cliff Krauss reported last week, Royal Dutch Shell began lobbying eagerly to get final approval for its long-delayed plans for exploratory drilling in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. The petro-giant is paying for national advertising as part of a campaign to convince the public and the government that it is taking the kind of safety precautions that would prevent the kind of catastrophe that unfolded in the gulf from happening in the Arctic.

Yet the Arctic is well known to be more fragile ecologically than the gulf. And on Thursday, the Pew Environmental Group released a detailed report brimming with charts and maps that explores the question of how well the government and industry would be equipped to deal with a blowout and spill there. The report concludes, not so well. And here are some word-for-word highlights on why:

• The Arctic Ocean is a unique operating environment, and the characteristics of the Arctic OCS [outer continental shelf] — its remote location, extreme climate and dynamic sea ice—exacerbate the risks and consequences of oil spills while complicating cleanup.
• Oil spill contingency plans often underestimate the probability and consequence of catastrophic blowouts, particularly for frontier offshore drilling in the U.S. Arctic Ocean.
• The impact of an oil well blowout in the U.S. Arctic Ocean could devastate an already stressed ecosystem, and there is very little baseline science upon which to anticipate the impact or estimate damage.
• Oil spill cleanup technologies and systems are unproved in the Arctic Ocean, and recent laboratory and held trials (including the Joint Industry Project) have evaluated only discrete technologies under controlled conditions.
• Certain environmental and weather conditions would preclude an oil spill response in the Arctic Ocean, yet an Arctic spill response gap is not incorporated into existing oil spill contingency plans or risk evaluations.

So the researchers concluded that far more study is needed of the Arctic marine ecosystem. Modeling should be devised to project the trajectory of oil flow in sea ice conditions should a spill occur, they added.

And deployment exercises should be conducted to determine how effective a spill response would be in such a remote, sparsely populated region “before introduction of new offshore oil spill risks,” the report said. (The study includes a detailed critique of Shell’s planning scenarios in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.)

In other words, the study’s message is that the Arctic is not ready for such deepwater drilling operations.

That conclusion did not go down well with Arctic drilling proponents. “I disagree with Pew’s insistence on an unspecified moratorium on Arctic development, because the perfect set of conditions simply never occurs,” Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, said in a statement. “I’ll continue to push the Obama administration for responsible Arctic development now to help meet America’s energy, national and economic security.”

SOURCE ARTICLE

U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION CEASE AND DESIST ORDER: ROYAL DUTCH SHELL BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION: 5 November 2010

INDEX OF RELATED ARTICLES

Settlements Near In Bribery Case: The Wall Street Journal 15 October 2010

Royal Dutch Shell bribery and corruption in Nigeria: The Wall Street Journal 16 October 2010

DOJ, SEC To Announce Panalpina-Related Bribery Settlements: NASDAQ 21 October 2010

U.S. in Pact Over Bribery Charges With Royal Dutch Shell: The Wall Street Journal 4 November 2010

Panalpina Settlements Announced, With $236.5 Million In Penalties: The Wall Street Journal 4 November 2010

Shell to pay $48m Nigerian bribe fine: Daily Telegraph 4 November 2010

Shell Bribes Among ‘Culture of Corruption’: Bloomberg 5 November 2010

Royal Dutch Shell hypocrisy on bribery: RoyalDutchShellPlc 5 November 2010

Top 10 settlements under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: The Wall Street Journal 6 November 2010

SHELL IN BRIBERY FINE: Daily Express 6 November 2010

Shell Nigerian Exploration and Production Co. Ltd. to pay $30 million criminal fine: 14 November 2010