Posts under ‘Exxon Mobil’

By ALEXIS FLYNN

LONDON—BP PLC said it will end its 13-year alliance with Russian state-owned oil company OAO Rosneft to explore for oil and gas in Sakhalin, due in part to the economics of the Far East project.

The U.K.-based energy producer said that in recent meetings with the shareholders and board of ZAO Elvary Neftegaz it confirmed its intention to exit the joint venture. “There are many reasons for this decision, including the challenging economics of the discovered resource in the KV [Kaigansky-Vasuykansky] block,” BP said Friday.

The company first formed an exploration alliance with Rosneft in 1998, with an initial license to search for hydrocarbons in Kaigansky-Vasuykansky area granted in 2002. The following year, BP and Rosneft created the Elvary Neftegaz joint venture before commencing drilling operations in 2004.

Earlier this week, Rosneft Chief Executive Eduard Khudainatov was quoted by Interfax as saying BP had lost interest in Sakhalin.

The end of the joint venture marks a further Russian retreat for BP. In January, Rosneft agreed with BP to a $16-billion share swap and development of three Arctic offshore licenses, but that deal was blocked by BP’s partners in the TNK-BP Ltd. joint venture. Rosneft later announced a global partnership with Exxon Mobil Corp.

BP said Friday it will work with Rosneft to find the best way to accomplish its exit from Sakhalin. In his remarks to Interfax, Mr. Khudainatov said Rosneft remained “very interested” in the project but wouldn’t offer participation to anyone else following BP’s departure.

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By JONATHAN FAHEY, AP Energy Writer: 30 December 2011

ALAMINOS CANYON BLOCK 857, GULF OF MEXICO (AP) — Two hundred miles off the coast of Texas, ribbons of pipe are reaching for oil and natural gas deeper below the ocean’s surface than ever before.

These pipes, which run nearly two miles deep, are connected to a floating Shell platform that is so remote they named it Perdido, which means “lost” in Spanish. What attracted Shell to this location is a geologic formation found throughout the Gulf of Mexico that may contain enough oil to satisfy U.S. demand for two years.

While Perdido is isolated, it isn’t alone. Across the Gulf, energy companies are probing dozens of new deepwater fields thanks to high oil prices and technological advances that finally make it possible to tap them.

The newfound oil will not do much to lower global oil prices. But together with increased production from onshore U.S. fields and slowing domestic demand for gasoline, it could help reduce U.S. oil imports by more than half over the next decade.

Eighteen months ago, such a flurry of activity in the Gulf seemed unlikely. The Obama administration halted drilling and stopped issuing new permits after the explosion of a BP well killed 11 workers and caused the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

But the drilling moratorium was eventually lifted and the Obama administration issued the first new drilling permit in March. Now the Gulf is humming again and oil executives describe it as the world’s best place to drill.

“In the short term and the medium term, it’s clearly the Gulf of Mexico,” says Matthais Bichsel, a Royal Dutch Shell PLC board member who is in charge of all of the company’s new projects and technology.

By early 2012 there will be more rigs in the Gulf designed to drill in its “deep water” — defined as 2,000 feet or deeper — than before the spill.

In November, Perdido began pumping oil from a field called Tobago; the well begins 9,627 feet below the surface of the Gulf. No other well on the globe produces oil in deeper water and that’s about as deep as the Gulf gets. For drillers, that means the entire Gulf is now within reach.

“We are at the point where … depth is not the primary issue anymore,” says Marvin Odum, the head of Royal Dutch Shell’s drilling unit in the Americas. “I do not worry that there is something in the Gulf that we cannot develop … if we can find it.”

From a distance, Perdido looks like an erector set perched on an aluminum can. This can, or “spar,” is a 500-foot-tall steel cylinder that sits mostly underwater, serving as a base for the equipment and living quarters above. It is stuffed with iron ore to lower its center of gravity, keeping the whole operation from bobbing in the water like a cork. The spar is tethered to the sea floor 8,000 feet below with ropes and chains.

Oil and natural gas are pumped to Perdido from nearby wells drilled by an onboard rig and from faraway wells drilled by satellite rigs. Water and other impurities are then removed from the oil and gas, which gets sent hundreds of miles through an undersea pipeline to terminals and refineries along the Gulf coast.

Perdido, which pumps the equivalent of 60,000 barrels of oil and natural gas a day, will eventually yield 100,000 barrels per day from 35 wells in a 30-mile radius, according to Shell. It will likely produce oil for decades — in all, as much as 360 million barrels of oil and 750 billion cubic feet of natural gas, according to Wood Mackenzie.

As global oil demand climbs past 89 million barrels a day and traditional onshore and shallow water fields are depleted, the deep waters of the Gulf and off the coasts of South America, West Africa and Australia are playing an increasingly important role.

In 2000, 1.5 million barrels of oil per day were produced from deepwater fields around the globe, or 2 percent of global production. In 2011, that number grew to 5.5 million barrels, or 6 percent of global production. By 2020, deepwater oil will account for 9 percent, according to IHS CERA.

The Gulf is attractive for many reasons. Its oil fields are enormous; it straddles the world’s biggest consumer of oil; it’s in a politically stable part of the world; and drillers can easily tap into a vast network of pipelines and refineries. Also, despite industry complaints, the cost of royalties, taxes and regulation in the U.S. are among the lowest in the world.

“Everybody wants to be there,” says Mohammad Rahman, the lead Gulf analyst for Wood Mackenzie.

By early 2012, there will be 40 deepwater rigs in the Gulf, up from 37 before the BP spill, according to Cinnamon Odell of ODS-Petrodata. BP received its first permit to drill in late October.

The Gulf produces an average of 1.5 million barrels of oil per day, according to Wood Mackenzie. That’s 27 percent of U.S. output and 8 percent of U.S. demand.

Thanks to more accurate imaging technologies, drillers are able to see under geologic formations that used to confound geologists. In June, ExxonMobil Corp. said it found 700 million barrels of oil — one of the biggest discoveries in the Gulf in last decade. In September, Chevron and BP also announced major finds, thought to be in the hundreds of millions of barrels of oil.

Many of the Gulf’s recent discoveries are in a geologic formation known as the Lower Tertiary, formed between 23 million and 65 million years ago. Perdido, which is operated by Shell and owned jointly by Shell, Chevron and BP, is the first to produce oil from this formation. Analysts say it could hold 15 billion barrels of oil.

As the BP disaster made clear, drilling in deep water presents difficulties and dangers. Last month a Chevron well in the deep waters off of Brazil ruptured and spilled 2,400 barrels of oil into the Atlantic after Chevron underestimated the pressure of the oil field it was tapping.

Perdido only recently reached its monthly production target after a year of operation because of difficulties getting oil and gas from the seabed to the platform. New devices designed to separate oil and gas on the sea floor have not performed as well as Shell hoped. It has taken months of adjustments made by underwater robots and other equipment on the platform to fix the problems.

Challenges like this have helped push the average cost of producing oil in the deepwater Gulf to $60 a barrel, according to IHS CERA, near the highest level ever. But with oil close to $100 a barrel, the expense is well worth it.

After all 35 wells are drilled for Perdido, its owners will likely have spent $6.2 billion on the project, according to Wood Mackenzie. But along with the risks, the Gulf offers great rewards: Perdido could ultimately generate $39 billion in revenue and $16 billion in profits.

Jonathan Fahey can be reached at http://www.facebook.com/Fahey.Jonathan .

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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MOSCOW -(Dow Jones)- BP PLC (BP, BP.LN) is to exit the Sakhalin-5 gas project, and Russian state oil company OAO Rosneft (ROSN.RS) will continue working on it on its own, Interfax news agency reported Monday, citing Rosneft Chief Executive Eduard Khudainatov.

“BP is not interested in this project and we have made no secret of that…” Khudainatov was quoted as saying. “We are very interested. And we will not offer this project to anyone else.”

Rosneft agreed in January with BP to a $16-billion share swap and development of three Arctic offshore licenses, but that deal was blocked by BP‘s partners in the TNK-BP Ltd. joint venture. Rosneft later announced a global partnership with Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM).

-By Nadia Popova, Dow Jones Newswires; +7 495 232-9198, nadia.popova@ dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires 12-26-111014ET Copyright (c) 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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By Associated Press, Updated: Friday, December 23, 4:20 PM

By Eduard Gismatullin and Elisha Bala-Gbogbo – Dec 23, 2011 9:13 AM GMT

Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), Europe’s largest oil company, confirmed the source of what could be Nigeria’s worst offshore spill in more than a decade to a leak in a flexible export line to a tanker.

Cleanup operations continued to the leak in the line between the tanker and production facility, The Hague-based Shell said in an update on its website. The company shut its 200,000 barrel-a-day Bonga offshore field after it leaked less than 40,000 barrels earlier this week.

“The sheen has thinned considerably due to a combination of natural factors and dispersant application, and in places is breaking up, all of which should aid further dissipation,” Mutiu Sunmonu, Shell’s chairman for Nigeria, said in the statement late yesterday.

The Anglo-Dutch company deployed five ships to spray dispersants and brought experts in to fight the spill. Bonga, Nigeria’s first deepwater discovery, produces almost 10 percent of the country’s crude, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) off the coast.

The leak could be the country’s worst since a January 1998 Exxon Mobil Corp. spill dumped an estimated 40,000 barrels into the sea from the Idoho platform on the southeastern coast, with slicks reported as far west as Lagos.

Shell had planned to export five cargoes of 1 million barrels each of Bonga crude a month from December to February, loading programs obtained by Bloomberg News show.

The damaged export line was isolated three days ago and the facility remains closed.

To contact the reporter on this story: Eduard Gismatullin in London at egismatullin@bloomberg.net

To contact the reporters on this story: Elisha Bala-Gbogbo in Abuja at ebalagbogbo@bloomberg.net

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December 22, 2011, 11:33 AM EST

By Joe Carroll and Juan Pablo Spinetto

Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) — Chevron Corp., the operator of the Brazilian offshore well that triggered oil leaks, and rig owner Transocean Ltd. will defend executives threatened with criminal indictments in the South American nation.

Chevron learned that Brazil’s federal police intend to indict employees involved in the drilling that led to the Nov. 7 leaks from seafloor fissures near the $3.6 billion Frade development, Kurt Glaubitz, a spokesman for the San Ramon, California-based company, said in a statement late yesterday. Transocean, in a separate statement late yesterday, said it will “vigorously defend the company and its collaborators.”

Chevron, the second-largest U.S. energy company by market value, has been fined 50 million reais ($26.9 million) and ordered to halt all drilling and crude production off Brazil’s coast after discovering the leaks last month. Chevron estimated the volume of the seeps at 3,000 barrels during the eight days it took for the company to locate and halt the leaks.

Chevron and other offshore oil explorers are facing increased scrutiny of their drilling practices in the wake of BP Plc’s 2010 blowout of a well in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers and led to the worst U.S. offshore crude spill.

In Brazil, the concerns have been compounded as the coastal city Rio de Janeiro prepares to host the 2014 World Cup and the Olympic Games two years later. Chevron’s Frade oil field is about 230 miles (370 kilometers) northeast of Rio in a region of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Campos Basin.

Employees Indicted

Chevron underestimated the amount of pressure at an oil deposit it was exploring, and crude leaked from the reservoir for about eight days, George Buck, president of Chevron’s Brazilian subsidiary, said on Nov. 20. Buck was among 17 Chevron and Transocean employees targeted for indictments, the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper reported yesterday. Glaubitz declined to identify the employees targeted for indictment. George wasn’t available to comment, the spokesman said.

Anthony Dovkants, a spokesman for Vernier, Switzerland- based Transocean, said in an e-mailed statement that the allegations were without merit.

Chevron rose 47 cents to $105.90 at 10:30 a.m. in New York trading. Transocean rose 1.3 percent to $40.39.

BP has booked more than $40 billion in losses related to last year’s Gulf disaster that sank Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig and spilled an estimated 4.9 million barrels of crude. The London-based oil producer also faces hundreds of lawsuits by fishermen, hoteliers and property owners in coastal areas where crude washed ashore.

Other Oil Spills

ConocoPhillips, the third-largest U.S. oil company, said yesterday it’s taking responsibility for two oil spills in China’s Bohai Bay in June and is setting up compensation funds to support environmental research and affected communities.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil company, shut its 200,000 barrel-a-day Bonga field off Nigeria after a leak during a tanker loading caused what may be the country’s worst offshore spill in more than a decade. The Bonga deep-water discovery produces almost 10 percent of Nigeria’s crude.

Exxon Mobil Corp. of Irving, Texas, is the biggest U.S. energy company by market value.

–Editors: Jasmina Kelemen, Tina Davis

To contact the reporters on this story: Joe Carroll in Chicago at jcarroll8@bloomberg.net; Juan Pablo Spinetto in Rio de Janeiro at jspinetto@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tina Davis at tinadavis@bloomberg.net

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By Sophie Mongalvy (AFP) 22 December 2011

LAGOS — Authorities rushed to prevent one of Nigeria’s worst recent oil spills from reaching the West African nation’s shoreline on Thursday, with production from a major Shell field also shut due to the leak.

Shell, which said the leak has been stopped, has estimated that less than 40,000 barrels of crude have spilled into the sea and was deploying ships with dispersants to attack the slick. Planes were also being mobilised.

It was Nigeria’s worst offshore spill since a 1998 Mobil incident, officials said, though onshore leaks have been estimated at levels far worse since that time in the oil-producing Niger Delta.

“It’s about the same level with what happened in 1998 with the Mobil oil spill,” said Peter Idabor, head of the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency.

“The oil slicks went down the whole coast line and beyond Nigeria’s borders.”

He said, however, that Nigeria was better prepared this time, with some 210 tonnes of dispersant being prepared to attack the spill, which has spread to an area between 35 and 45 miles (about 55 to 70 kilometres) in size.

He said it was unclear when the oil slick could reach the shore. London-based Oil Spill Response Limited was to be involved in the clean up, Idabor said.

The slick was moving in the direction of Forcados, which is located along the coast of Nigeria’s Delta state, he said.

Nnimmo Bassey, the Nigeria-based head of Friends of the Earth International who has closely monitored spills in the country, called it a major incident and pressed for an independent analysis of the amount of oil leaked.

“We can see a real threat to livelihood to fishermen and local communites onshore,” he said.

The leak occurred Tuesday at Shell’s Bonga field some 120 kilometres off Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer and an OPEC member. Production has halted at the field, which has a capacity of 200,000 barrels per day.

The company claimed Thursday that “up to 50 percent of the leaked oil has already dissipated due to natural dispersion and evaporation,” but that figure was impossible to verify independently.

Bassey cast doubt on the figure, saying “I don’t believe that 50 percent would disperse over just less than two days.”

Shell said it was deploying vessels and mobilising planes to fight the spill.

“To accelerate the clean-up at sea, we are deploying vessels with dispersants to break up the oil sheen at sea,” Shell Nigeria head Mutiu Sunmonu said.

“We are mobilising airplanes that will support the vessels in this operation … We are currently working with the Nigerian government to inform local communities and fishermen about the situation.”

Shell said the leak occurred during a transfer of crude to a waiting tanker. The likely source was an export line linking a production vessel to the tanker, it said.

Nigeria has been producing between 2.0 and 2.4 million barrels per day in recent months.

Scores of oil spills have occurred in the country, but most have been onshore, particularly due to pipeline sabotage aimed at stealing crude to sell on the black market as well as militant attacks.

Activists say Shell and other companies have not done enough to prevent oil leaks at their facilities.

The UN released a report in August saying decades of oil spills in the Nigerian area of Ogoniland may require the biggest cleanup ever undertaken, with communities dependent upon farmers and fishermen left ravaged.

Activists say two spills in the Ogoni community of Bodo in 2008 amounted to hundreds of thousands of barrels, but Shell disputes that figure and says it was far lower.

Amnesty International has estimated that if all types of oil pollution in the vast Niger Delta — the country’s oil-producing region — are added up over the past half-century, it would be “on par with the Exxon Valdez every year over the last 50 years.”

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.

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By JON GAMBRELL, Associated Press 22 December 2011

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — An oil spill near the coast of Nigeria is likely the worst to hit those waters in a decade, a government official said Thursday, as slicks from the Royal Dutch Shell PLC spill approached the country’s southern shoreline.

The slick from Shell’s Bonga field has affected 115 miles (185 kilometers) of ocean near Nigeria’s coast, Peter Idabor, who leads the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, told The Associated Press. Idabor said officials expect the slick to reach beaches by Thursday afternoon.

Shell, the major oil producer in Nigeria, said Wednesday the spill likely occurred as workers tried to offload oil onto a waiting tanker. The company published photographs of the spill, showing a telltale rainbow sheen in the ocean, but said it believes that about 50 percent of the leaked oil has already evaporated.

The source of the leak has been plugged, Idabor said, but the spill still threatens the shoreline and wildlife. Idabor said experts from Britain were coming to help with the cleanup.

Shell announced Wednesday that the Bonga spill likely was less than 40,000 barrels, or 1.68 million gallons. That’s about the same amount of oil spilled offshore in 1998 at a Mobil field. The 1998 spill saw oil slicks extended for more than 100 miles (some 160 kilometers) to Lagos, the country’s commercial capital.

“Since the Mobil spill, this is just about the most major one,” Idabor said.

Nigerian authorities hope to use oil booms and chemicals to disperse or collect the spilled oil, Idabor said. In a statement, Shell said its Nigerian subsidiary already had sent ships out to the slick to use dispersant on the oil sheen. The company also said it would use infrared equipment to trace places where the sheen is the thickest.

Bonga sits about 75 miles (120 kilometers) off Nigeria’s coast. It can produce about 200,000 barrels of oil and 150 million cubic feet of gas a day, according to Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary. Production at the field, which Shell operates in partnership with the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corp., has been halted since the discovery of the spill.

Environmentalists blame Shell and other foreign oil firms for polluting the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta. Some environmentalists say as much as 550 million gallons of oil poured into the delta during Shell’s roughly 50 years of production in Nigeria — a rate roughly comparable to one Exxon Valdez disaster per year. An estimated 11 million gallons was released during the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

Shell in recent years has said most of the spills in the delta are caused by thieves tapping into pipelines to steal crude oil, which ends up sold into the black market or cooked into a crude diesel or kerosene. Apparently predicting interest in the spill would grow, Shell already had taken out Internet advertising Thursday on search engines, directing those searching for the spill to their website.

Slicks from the Bonga spill likely will reach beaches near the Forcados River delta on Thursday, affecting wildlife there, Idabor said.

Nigeria, an OPEC member nation producing about 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day, is a top supplier to the U.S.

• Royal Dutch Shell PLC: http://www.shell.com
• Shell’s Nigeria spill website: http://bit.ly/rqfnxi

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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By Pierre Bertrand | December 22, 2011 2:07 AM GMT

Alaskan environmentalists are sounding the alarm bells this week, responding to two major oil industry victories in a state that has been a recurring flash point between environmental groups, legislators and the giants of petroleum exploration.

Daniel Fisher, Forbes Staff

12/20/2011

For nearly 200 years, the Alien Tort Claims Act lay dormant, a one-sentence law passed by the first Congress that gave federal courts jurisdiction to hear any lawsuit brought by “an alien” for torts committed “in violation of the law of nations.” Then around 1980 inventive lawyers rediscovered it as a tool for international human-rights enforcement. One judge dubbed the long-neglected law a “legal Lohengrin,” after the knight in the Richard Wagner opera who magically appears in a boat drawn by a swan.

Early next year the Supreme Court will decide whether this law can be the legal vehicle for pressing multibillion-d0llar claims against corporations that lawyers believe are responsible for human-rights violations. One case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, asks whether Nigerian villagers can sue the oil giant in U.S. court over the actions of government troops they say were acting on Shell’s orders to protect its valuable installations in Nigeria. It is paired with another case involving the 1993 Torture Victims Protection Act. In both, the court is being asked to sort out a dispute among the federal districts about whether these laws apply to individuals only, or can be extended to organizations like Shell and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

The stakes are huge for corporations, which theoretically could be held liable for any actions of the government in nations where they do business, pay taxes, and rely on local forces to protect their assets.

“There have been plenty of cases where the theory is, basically, the corporation has aided and abetted the human rights violations just by doing business with the violators,” said Meir Feder, an appellate lawyer in Jones Day’s New York office who is active in international corporate law. “It’s been a real growth industry.”

Lawyers really embraced the 1789 law after the U.S. Supreme Court decided  in 2004 that a Mexican national could not use the ATS to sue the Mexican agent who abducted him on instructions of U.S. officials. It was a defeat for the plaintiff in that case, but the high court flashed “an ambiguous green light” to other lawsuits by suggesting the ATC could be used to allege torts that didn’t exist when it was written in 1789.

The main question before the court when it hears the Shell and Torture Protection cases, probably in February, will be whether the laws can be applied to organizations instead of individuals. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York rejected the Shell case in December 2010, saying “corporate liability is not a discernable—much less universally recognized—norm of customary international law.”

The decision offers a lengthy diversion into 18th century law and politics, when pirates were a major foreign-policy concern and large parts of the world had no formal government at all. The majority concluded that while enforcing human rights was the “singular achievement” of international law after World War II, it has never been stretched to include lawsuits against corporations. The ATC applies to the actions of states and individuals,the court ruled, since ultimately only people in a position of governmental authority can bear moral responsibility for acts so heinous they rise to the level of “international crime.”

Even the ever-sympathetic Ninth Circuit signed off on this view,deciding in 2010 that Chevron couldn’t be sued under the ATS for the actions of Nigerian security forces when they retook an offshore oil platform that had been occupied by protesters.

But the 11th Circuit ruled the other way in 2008 in a lawsuit by Colombian villagers allegedly abused by paramiliaries in the employ of a U.S. corporation. And in July of this year the influential D.C. Circuit ruled that ExxonMobil could be sued for allegedly allowing government security forces detailed to its facility in Aceh, Indonesia to commit murder, sexual assault and other crimes against villagers.

The court rejected ExxonMobil’s argument that the Supreme Court had eliminated aiding and abetting liability in its pivotal Central Bank case in 1994. It still applied in the world of international crimes, the court held. None less than George Washington had issued a proclamation in 1793 warning U.S. citizens they’d be found liable for “aiding, or abetting hostilities” against any power involved in fighting in Europe.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative favorite, issued a strongly worded dissent.  The ATC was intended to “avoid conflicts with foreign governments” by providing redress to aliens who suffered injuries within the U.S. Extending it to actions on foreign soil creates rather than avoids conflicts, and itself conflicts with the Torture Prevention Act which only protects U.S. citizens. If the ATS works the way the majority would have it, he wrote, then an alien could bring a lawsuit against a corporation in U.S. court that was barred by a U.S. citizen.

The Torture Victims Statute case seems a simpler proposition, since the law gives the right to sue to “any individual” who under “actual or apparent authority” of government authority tortures another individual. Congress considered, and rejected, using the word “person” which is understood to include corporations and other organizations, said Feder, who not surprisingly represents corporate clients who say they are not “individuals.”

“I don’t have a problem predicting it is quite likely the Supreme Court is going to say corporations are not subject to suit,” he said.

The Roberts Court is also likely to trim the sails of plaintiff lawyers who want to use the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act to pursue 21st-century class actions, Feder said.

“At the end of the day, the current Supreme Court is likely to take a much more restrictive view of what kind of cases will be allowed to go forward than a lot of lower courts have allowed,” he said. The ATC was designed for situations where aliens had no way to get redress and failing to deal with their complaints would lead to “serious military and diplomatic problems,” Feder said.

“The current Supreme Court is going to look at that and say `We’re not going to extend that as a sort of general right of action for human rights violations all over the world.’”

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and other corporations doing business in dangerous parts of the world will certainly be pulling for the legal Lohengrin to disappear into the mists again.

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