* IEA sees continued gap between OPEC output and demand for OPEC oil

* Maintains that strategic petroleum reserves release is working

* No decision yet on further stocks releases

By Alex Lawler and Barbara Lewis

LONDON, July 13 (Reuters) – World oil demand growth will accelerate next year, adding to the pressure on available supplies, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday, contradicting a more conservative outlook from producer group OPEC.

In its first 2012 forecast in a monthly report, the IEA said oil use would grow by 1.47 million barrels per day (bpd) to 91 million bpd. The agency also trimmed its estimate of demand growth this year to 1.20 million bpd.

The IEA’s 2012 prediction was more than the 1.32 million bpd expected by OPEC and lower than a forecast from the United States’ Energy Information Administration. It expects all of the growth next year to come from emerging economies.

“Aside from economic growth, downside pressures from higher-than-expected oil prices also represent a risk to the forecast,” said the Paris-based IEA, which advises 28 industrialised countries.

Differences between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and consumer nations widened after the 12-member OPEC in June failed to reach a deal on a Saudi-led proposal to increase output.

In response, the IEA decided to release oil from emergency stocks for only the third time since it was founded in 1974 to fill the gap in supplies left by the disruption to Libya’s output.

The IEA on Wednesday maintained the stocks move had added supply of high-quality crude to a tight market and the agency took “a resolutely positive view” of the strategy so far.

“The point of the stock release was to add some liquidity and flexibility into the market. I think we’ve done that,” David Fyfe, head of the IEA’s oil industry and markets division, told Reuters Insider.

Oil LCOc1, trading at $117 a barrel on Wednesday, is higher than it was before the release. OPEC said the use of stocks had had no impact, while investor Jim Rogers on Wednesday called it “meaningless” to the market.

Fyfe said the IEA had yet to decide whether it would release more supplies and reiterated it would make a decision 30 days after the initial announcement on June 23.

2011 DEMAND GROWTH TRIMMED

Next year’s demand expansion follows on from lowered expectations for this year.

In the report, the IEA trimmed its 2011 global demand growth estimate by 70,000 bpd, citing the impact of high prices and a weaker economic outlook for developed economies.

While OPEC did not formally agree to boost its supplies at last month’s meeting, the IEA report added to evidence that core members are pumping more crude.

The IEA said OPEC output rose significantly in June following a unilateral supply increase from the group’s leading exporter, Saudi Arabia.

According to the IEA, Saudi Arabia pumped 9.7 million bpd in June, just shy of the 9.8 million bpd cited by a senior Gulf OPEC delegate on Tuesday.

Overall, OPEC production in June increased by nearly 850,000 bpd compared with May, the IEA said, but it still took the view that OPEC oil output would remain well short of expected demand.

It said demand for OPEC crude would average almost 31 million bpd in the second half of this year, around 1 million bpd more than OPEC produced in June.

The IEA also said Saudi Arabia’s crude exports could be eroded by a growing domestic need for oil for power generation, and OPEC’s oil production capacity would struggle until Libyan output began to recover.

It did not expect a Libyan recovery to happen until the end of 2012 and said OPEC capacity would fall to a low point of around 33.8 million bpd in the first quarter of next year. (Additional reporting by Simon Falush; Editing by William Hardy)

© Thomson Reuters 2011 All rights reserved

SOURCE ARTICLE

Shell’s search for profits widens even as the oil price climbs

• Shell now ‘world’s largest trader’ as well as oil major
• Plans to explore in Arctic, Iraq, Russia and deep sea

Terry Macalister: Thursday 3 February 2011 20.07 GMT

Shell earned the majority of its profits in 2010 not from pump sales, but from exploration and development. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

As Shell fought to dismiss accusations today that it was cashing in on high oil prices, the company gave a new insight into how it has racked up billions in profit by revealing itself as the “world’s biggest trading business”.

Peter Voser, Shell’s chief executive, said he felt the pain of motorists struggling to pay record fuel prices, pointing out that the Anglo-Dutch oil company was also suffering in its refining and marketing businesses. But critics dismissed that argument, saying that $16bn of the $18.6bn earned by the company over the past 12 months came from the “upstream” operations of exploration and development.

While refining profits have been noticeably thin for all oil companies in recent years, Shell has found other ways of boosting its profits even further by buying and selling products for its own and third-party interests.

Simon Henry, the chief financial officer, made the unusual disclosure today that Shell “may now be the world’s largest trading business” – not just in oil, but also chemicals, natural gas and even carbon dioxide. He denied the company acted as a “speculator”, but admitted that volatility – when prices gyrate wildly up and down – was the point at which any trading unit would make the most money.

The company declined to disclose how many traders were now employed in a business that has increasingly attracted the attention of banks and other non-industry players. The role of such intermediaries is a sensitive issue given that the Middle East oil cartel, Opec, has often blamed them for driving up prices irrespective of actual supply or demand.

Shell sells petrol and diesel in Britain through 900 branded sites but owns 600 of them; the rest are controlled by third-party dealers who have the freedom to charge their own prices.

Supermarkets tend to be the retail price-setters, and City analysts confirm there are no great profits to be made, which is why the number of outlets has plunged over the past five years.

Most of Shell’s 100,000 employees are not working at the pumps in a UK service station but in offices, refineries and offshore platforms in more than 80 countries across the globe.

Non-essential Shell staff have just been evacuated from Egypt, but others are still moving into Iraq, where the company is still pressing ahead with new plans to develop the huge Majnoon and West Qurna fields. In Qatar, Shell has been spending more than $20bn (£12.5bn) and has employed more than 50,000 workers to build new gas-to-liquids plants, where gases are transformed into synthetic liquid fuels, and liquefied natural gas facilities.

Shell is also busy building up its positions in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and off Brazil, despite the safety concerns triggered by BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill.

That is a more obvious way of expanding the bottom line, as are takeovers, but Voser declined to comment on speculation that his company had considered a move on BP at the height of its Gulf crisis.

The Anglo-Dutch company has just won new exploration rights off Greenland along with Statoil of Norway and expects to start drilling wells in two to three years. But it has been forced to shelve plans for offshore exploration of Alaska owing to a continuing lack of permits and tighter safety requirements following the Gulf accident. Voser said he was still hopeful of moving ahead with drilling in the Beaufort Sea in 2012 but admitted: “Critical permits continue to be delayed and the timeline for getting these permits is still uncertain.”

Shell said it was also planning to forge closer links with Rosneft and Gazprom in Russia though he dismissed the idea of a share swap similar to the one just arranged between BP and Rosneft.

Shell might have made fourth-quarter profits of $5.7bn (£3.5bn) and paid out dividends of $10.2bn during 2010, the highest level of any company in Europe, but it was not its best ever result, and was not enough for the City either. Shell’s shares fell 3%; analysts at broker Collins Stewart complained that the figures were “disappointing”. Voser said he, too, was not satisfied with the final quarterly results, and Shell claimed it could still do better – partly through the selling-off of further non-core assets such as the Stanlow refinery in Cheshire.

While he believed the current high crude price might not last because of the “cushion” provided by spare capacity among Middle East producers, he said the commodity boom disrupted by recession in the west “may return”. That could please investors and pension funds but will look like the road to ruin for the hard-pressed British motorist.

GUARDIAN SOURCE ARTICLE

NO SHORTAGE A Chesapeake Energy natural gas well near Burlington, Pa. Experts say the nation has gas reserves for 100-plus years.

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

A version of this article appeared in print on November 17, 2010, on page F1 of the New York edition.

THREE summers ago, the world’s supertankers were racing across the oceans as fast as they could to deliver oil to markets growing increasingly thirsty for energy. Americans were grumbling about paying as much as $4 a gallon for gasoline, as the price of crude oil leapt to $147 a barrel. Natural gas prices were vaulting too, sending home electricity bills soaring.

A book making the rounds at the time, “Twilight in the Desert,” by Matthew R. Simmons, seemed to sum up the conventional wisdom: the age of cheap, plentiful oil and gas was over. “Sooner or later, the worldwide use of oil must peak,” the book concluded, “because oil, like the other two fossil fuels, coal and natural gas, is nonrenewable.”

But no sooner did the demand-and-supply equation shift out of kilter than it swung back into something more palatable and familiar. Just as it seemed that the world was running on fumes, giant oil fields were discovered off the coasts of Brazil and Africa, and Canadian oil sands projects expanded so fast, they now provide North America with more oil than Saudi Arabia. In addition, the United States has increased domestic oil production for the first time in a generation.

Meanwhile, another wave of natural gas drilling has taken off in shale rock fields across the United States, and more shale gas drilling is just beginning in Europe and Asia. Add to that an increase in liquefied natural gas export terminals around the world that connected gas, which once had to be flared off, to the world market, and gas prices have plummeted.

Energy experts now predict decades of residential and commercial power at reasonable prices. Simply put, the world of energy has once again been turned upside down.

“Oil and gas will continue to be pillars for global energy supply for decades to come,” said James Burkhard, a managing director of IHS CERA, an energy consulting firm. “The competitiveness of oil and gas and the scale at which they are produced mean that there are no readily available substitutes in either one year or 20 years.”

Some unpleasant though predictable consequences are likely, of course, as the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico this spring demonstrated. Some environmentalists say that gas from shale depends on drilling techniques and chemicals that may jeopardize groundwater supplies, and that a growing dependence on Canadian oil sands is more dangerous for the climate than most conventional oils because mining and processing of the sands require

so much energy and a loss of forests.

And while moderately priced oil and gas bring economic relief, they also make renewable sources of energy like wind and solar relatively expensive and less attractive to investors unless governments impose a price on carbon emissions.

“When wind guys talk to each other,” said Michael Skelly, president of Clean Line Energy Partners, a developer of transmission lines for renewable energy, “they say, ‘Damn, what are we going to do about the price of natural gas?’ ”

Oil and gas executives say they provide a necessary energy bridge; that because both oil and gas have a fraction of the carbon-burning intensity of coal, it makes sense to use them until wind, solar, geothermal and the rest become commercially viable.

“We should celebrate the fact that we have enough oil and gas to carry us forward until a new energy technology can take their place,” said Robert N. Ryan Jr., Chevron’s vice president for global exploration.

Mr. Skelly and other renewable energy entrepreneurs counter that without a government policy fixing a price on carbon emissions through a tax or cap and trade, the hydrocarbon bridge could go on and on without end.

So what happened to shift the energy world so drastically the last few years? Is the shift reversible once the economy picks up?

The recession throttled the world’s demand for energy, particularly in the United States and Europe, but that tells only part of the story. Periodic jolts, like the Arab oil embargoes in the 1960s and 1970s, are likely to recur in a world with unpredictable actors like Iran. Access to oil and gas may always be limited by geopolitics, especially in places like the Middle East. Just in the last few days, the decline in the dollar spurred a new spike in oil prices, along with those of other commodities.

Yet, the outlook, based on long-term trends barely visible five years ago, now appears to promise large supplies of oil and gas from multiple new sources for decades into the future.

The same high prices that inspired dire fear in the first place helped to resolve them. High oil and gas prices produced a wave of investment and drilling, and technological innovation has unlocked oceans of new resources. Oil and gas from ocean bottoms, the Arctic and shale rock fields are quickly replacing tired fields in places like Mexico, Alaska and the North Sea.

Much depends, of course, on government policies in the coming decades. The International Energy Agency, the Paris-based organization that advises industrialized countries, projected this month that global energy demand would increase by an astounding 36 percent between 2008 and 2035, assuming the broad policy commitments already announced by governments were exercised. Oil demand is projected to grow to 99 million barrels a day in 2035, from 84 million barrels a day in 2009.

Even in an alternative world where there is a concerted, coordinated effort to reduce future carbon emissions sharply, the International Energy Agency projected oil demand would peak at 88 million barrels a day around 2020, then decline to 81 million barrels a day in 2035 — just fractionally less than today’s consumption. Natural gas use, meanwhile, would increase by 15 percent from current levels by 2035. In contrast, global coal use would dip a bit, while nuclear power and renewable forms of energy would grow considerably.

No matter what finally plays out, energy experts expect there will be plenty, perhaps even an abundance, of oil and gas. IHS CERA, which monitors oil and gas fields around the world, projects that productive capacity for liquid fuels could rise to 112 million barrels a day in 2030 (including 2.75 million barrels in biofuels), from 92.6 million barrels a day this year.

“The estimates for how much oil there is in the world continue to increase,” said William M. Colton, Exxon Mobil’s vice president for corporate strategic planning. “There’s enough oil to supply the world’s needs as far as anyone can see.”

More promising still is that the growing oil production comes from a variety of sources — making the world less vulnerable to a price war with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries or an outbreak of violence in a major producing country like Nigeria. As IHS CERA and other oil analysts see it, new oil is going to come from both conventional and unconventional sources — from anticipated expansions of fields in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and from a continued expansion of deepwater drilling off Africa and Brazil, in the Gulf of Mexico and across the Arctic, where hopes are high in the oil world, although little exploration has yet been done.

The vast oil sands fields in western Canada, deemed uneconomical by many oil companies as few as 15 years ago, are now as important to global supply growth as the continuing expansions of fields in Saudi Arabia, the current No. 1 producer.

“We’ve got a wealth of opportunities to address around the world,” said Mr. Ryan, Chevron’s vice president. “We have quite a few deepwater settings all over the world, some of them very new, like the Black Sea. There are Arctic settings. We have efforts under way re-exploring Nigeria, Angola, Australia. The easy stuff has been found, that’s true, but in the end, we still have many basins in the world to explore or to re-explore.”

The biggest wild card, and a potential game-changer, is Iraq, which now produces a modest 2.5 million barrels a day. With Saddam Hussein out of the picture, international oil companies have rushed there. If all the projects they have agreed to develop pan out, and if Iraq can contain its political turbulence enough to pump, production could mushroom to 12 million barrels a day by the end of the decade — well above what Saudi Arabia produces today.

But even if Iraq’s production does not rise to this level, IHS CERA predicts “it will eventually join Saudi Arabia and Russia as one of the largest global producers, with increasing influence on OPEC and world oil markets.”

New supplies are only part of the equation. Technological innovation has made the use of oil and gas more efficient, too, helping to keep rising demand for energy at least partly in check. Cars, buildings and appliances are becoming less wasteful, and biofuels are increasingly supplementing oil products and extending their reach.

Even in China, India and the rest of the developing world, where the demands of a growing middle class probably represent the world’s biggest energy challenge, there are positive signs.

China, for instance, is making a big push to reduce energy subsidies for exports like steel and aluminum. Countries around the developing world are severely cutting gasoline subsidies, forcing consumers of new cars to contain their exuberance. Cars that run on compressed natural gas are replacing more carbon-intensive gasoline-driven vehicles across Latin America and Asia. Natural gas sales should soar in Europe and the United States if the electric car takes off in the next couple of decades, as utilities are expected to phase out coal-burning plants in favor of gas.

Not surprisingly, the back-to-the-future world of oil and gas begins in the United States, still the biggest economy and the driver of energy markets since World War II.

For the last two decades, the United States has produced less oil each year and been increasingly dependent on imports than the year before. As recently as a decade ago, most experts predicted that the country had only 25 years of gas reserves, and that it would need to import at least half of its needs in the future.

Today the country has reversed both trends, chiefly because of new drilling techniques that have opened world-class oil and gas resources. In 2009, domestic production began to reverse its annual decline for the first time since 1991. The Energy Department expects domestic supplies to grow through 2035, absent a significant decline in oil prices.

Largely shut out of the Middle East, international companies including BP and Shell began seriously looking at the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico in the 1990s. Exploration and drilling below 10,000 feet of water and through miles of hard rock, thick salt and tightly packed sands required the development of supercomputers and three-dimensional imaging and equipment that could withstand the heat and pressures common at such depths, as well as submarine robots to make repairs.

After only a decade of serious deepwater drilling, the gulf is undergoing a drilling renaissance. Despite a decline in shallow-water production, gulf oil production has increased by more than 12 percent since 2000, to 1.7 million barrels a day, comparable to Libya’s output. Those increases are bound to slow over the next year or two as the federal government recalibrates regulations after the BP accident, but oil executives say they are committed to continue the production boom.

“We’ll see the industry ramp back up, go back to work and maybe in a year or year and a half, we’ll be back in a normal pace,” Marvin E. Odum, president of Shell Oil, a major Gulf producer, predicted.

Similar advances have made drilling gas and oil from shale possible on a large scale for the first time. Advances in so-called horizontal drilling allow well drillers to steer and carve through hard shale to expose more and hard-to-reach rock, and it also makes possible drilling under city neighborhoods, as in Fort Worth, which happens to sit atop a large gas field.

Horizontal drilling and advanced fracturing techniques across wide swaths of Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas over the last few years have produced so much natural gas that experts now say the United States has reserves for more than 100 years. That means the country is not only going to have plenty of gas, but also is likely to become an exporter over the next decade.

The American gas glut has set off a glut around the world, because the building spree in recent years of Middle Eastern and Asian liquefied natural gas terminals was originally intended to send much of their gas to the United States.

“The technology producing these resources has absolutely made the difference,” Mr. Odum said. “It’s the same with the Arctic, with the shale oil, all over the world. Technology is the key.”

Shale drilling is also beginning to produce significant amounts of oil in the United States. The Bakken shale field centered in North Dakota has become the fastest-growing major oil field in the United States, with production rocketing to about 350,000 barrels a day, from 100,000 barrels a day a decade ago. In a recent report, the consultancy firm PFC Energy projected production would climb to 450,000 barrels a day by 2013.

Add up the shale, the deepwater drilling and Canadian oil sands, says Edward L. Morse, the head at commodity research at Credit Suisse, and what you get is less dependency on OPEC and hostile countries like Venezuela. Synthetic oil made from Canadian oil sands has become the largest single source of imported oil this year, far more than from any OPEC country.

Mr. Morse said the demand side of the equation also helped. He noted that American demand for gasoline appeared to have peaked in 2007 and could decline by 15 to 20 percent by 2020 because of increasingly efficient cars and a federal mandate requiring that renewable fuels, like ethanol, blended into transportation fuels must increase to 36 billion gallons in 2022, from nine billion gallons in 2008.

“When you add it up,” Mr. Morse noted, “you get something that very closely approximates energy independence.”

Source Article

Thu Jun 17, 2010 7:27am GMT

By Nick Tattersall

LAGOS (Reuters) – Royal Dutch Shell has some $40 billion worth of potential investment in deepwater oil projects in Nigeria on hold amid uncertainty over planned reforms to the energy sector, a senior executive told Reuters.

Mutiu Sunmonu, country chairman for Shell Nigeria, said it was difficult to make commitments without clarity over the terms of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), legislation which will change the fiscal and regulatory framework in the OPEC member.

“Just looking at deepwater alone, we have a portfolio of about $40 billion worth of projects…but we will not be able to make a move on these until we have a landing on the PIB,” he said in an interview at his Lagos home late on Wednesday.

“(That is) potential investment that we are not able to sign off on at this time,” Sunmonu said.

Nigeria says the PIB will make state oil firm NNPC more competitive and transparent, encourage investment, promote local oil company involvement in the industry and increase gas supplies to the dilapidated domestic power sector.

But international oil companies are worried the bill will impose higher taxes and royalties while failing to address key issues of under-funding, corruption and security.

The bill has been repeatedly delayed by revisions and disagreement. It has stalled again in its final stages as President Goodluck Jonathan, who took over last month following the death of late President Umaru Yar’Adua, and new Oil Minister Diezani Allison-Madueke revisit some of the issues.

With elections due by next April at the latest, the new administration has little time to push the bill through, but Sunmonu voiced optimism that differences could be overcome.

“The present government is determined to pass the PIB… I know the minister is planning to have a meeting with captains of industry to further consult with us on how to close the gap.”

Sunmonu also said he had brought to the oil ministry’s attention the need to renew onshore licences which lapsed under the previous administration, saying government had pledged to “dispose of all these legacy issues as quickly as possible.”

NO COMPARISON TO U.S. GULF

Sunmonu said security in the Niger Delta, where three years of militant attacks since early 2006 have prevented Nigeria from pumping much above two thirds of its 3 million barrels per day (bpd) capacity, had greatly improved since an amnesty last year.

But he said bunkering — the theft of industrial quantities of crude oil — had increased.

“I think there is an increase in the level of bunkering in the last few months, there is an upward swing. I always use an estimate of about 100,000 bpd and I don’t think that would be too off the mark,” he said.

The Niger Delta, home to Africa’s biggest oil and gas industry, has suffered decades of pollution from spills which have been left to fester, damaging the air, soil and water.

The U.S. government’s all-out fight to contain the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a marked contrast to the situation in the Niger Delta, leading local communities and campaigners to ask why Shell and other international oil firms in Nigeria are not paying compensation.

Sunmonu said the comparison was not fair, noting that between 2000-2007 10,000 barrels a year were spilled on average from Shell operations in the Niger Delta, 70-75 percent of them the result of sabotage or oil thieves drilling into pipelines.

In 2009, just 2 percent of spills were caused by factors within Shell’s control, he said.

“It is incorrect to draw a parallel … The law in Nigeria is very clear. We do not pay compensation for sabotage spills. And I think the intent of the law is correct,” he said.

“If you pay for sabotage spills then you are only fuelling more sabotage and more spills. Where a spill happens as a result of our own error or equipment failure, we do pay compensation.”

The Anglo-Dutch giant says it paid $4 million in compensation last year and cleans up all spills whatever their cause, although communities or armed gangs sometimes deny it access to spill sites.

Sunmonu said he was not concerned by China’s reported ambition to secure 6 billion barrels of Nigerian oil, saying Shell was “not afraid of competition.” Analysts say China is most likely to access Nigerian reserves by snapping up acreage in new licensing rounds rather than buying existing operations. But China has approached the Nigerian government about some blocks held by Western firms.

Sunmonu said he was not aware of any direct approach to Shell by China about buying stakes in Shell Nigeria joint ventures.

© Thomson Reuters 2010 All rights reserved

REUTERS ARTICLE

On Thursday, Royal Dutch Shell, BP’s Anglo-Dutch rival, is expected to report a 70 per cent fall in profits to $2.5 billion.

A vast new oilfield off the coast of Brazil could contain up to two billion barrels of crude, providing fresh evidence that a spate of discoveries in the region is opening up a new frontier for the global oil industry.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s Nigerian unit said protesters besieged its Olomoro pumping station in the southern Niger River delta to press demands for a greater share in the region’s oil wealth for local communities. Demonstrations that started last week continued yesterday, said Tony Okonedo, a company spokesman. The protests concern “issues that are already receiving attention” from Shell, he said, adding that “we’re in dialogue with the community.” The action hasn’t disrupted oil production because the Olomoro station has been shut since June “due to the general security situation in the region,” Okonedo said.

Refiners need to consolidate and close plants to increase profitability, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said yesterday. The Hague-based Shell put two refineries in northern Germany up for sale earlier this year. Chief Executive Officer Peter Voser has pledged to simplify decision-making and cut costs against a deteriorating economic backdrop.

Goodbye

Shell is completely different to do. Not only without Linda Cook yesterday unexpectedly steps, but with substantially fewer people. How many jobs are lost, Shell would not say, but a spokesman in the United States told AP that the 2000 jobs at headquarters in The Hague under pressure.

According to the blog royaldutchshellplc.com are mainly supportive, administrative and IT staff. There are also rumors that 30% of Management lost his job as Shell denies. However, in a leaked e-mail that Peter Voser sent to staff this morning that “fewer people will take more strategic decisions.

“Fragment of Voser e-mail, read here all mail

There are about 24,000 workers affected by the reorganization, or because they are within a short resignation letter in the mailbox or get by them to another location to be transferred.

Shell is the other group classified the three divisions Exploration & Production, Gas & Power and Oil Zanden become one. This is also the departure of Cook better understand what they did in directing the Gas & Power division thus disappears. Last year they even saw the appointment as successor to Jeroen van der Veer as CEO of Shell Peter Voser to go.

The new division ( “Upstream”) in the future not to production but to location on the world map divided: America and the rest of the world.Perhaps the headquarters in Den Haag less important and therefore that job disappear?

Oil in panic 
Talking about oil have warned Saudi Arabia yesterday for a renewed rise in oil prices to $ 150 per barrel. Minister of Petroleum Ali al-Naimi said that the low prices no investments be made to reach more difficult to extract oil.This occurs at a given moment tightness in the market and prices, the huge increase to over $ 150 per barrel.

According to The Wall Street Journal shortly before a collapse in oil prices to be expected. Stocks of OPEC continue to only grow, storage space is running out and the economies of major industrialized countries have far more shrinkage than growth.

Anna Dijkman  17:11  27 Mei 2009

SOURCE ARTICLE IN DUTCH (THE ABOVE IS A GOOGLE TRANSLATION)

The army confirmed a pipeline supplying state-owned Nigerian Gas Co. had been blown up but with no impact on supply. Chevron Corp. over the weekend said its operations continued as normal. Royal Dutch Shell PLC reiterated Monday that it is investigating a report that one of its facilities was attacked.