September, 2007:

By David Lee Smith September 26, 2007

It appears that Netherlands-based Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS-A) (NYSE: RDS-B) is about to become more refined. And it has to venture to Port Arthur, Texas, to do so.

Shell and its Saudi Aramco partner, the principals in Motiva Enterprises, which owns a Port Arthur refinery with a current 275,000 barrels-per-day capacity, will spend about $7 billion and three years to expand the facility to a capacity near 600,000 bpd. This will make the facility the U.S.’s largest, besting ExxonMobil’s (NYSE: XOM) 557,000 bpd Baytown, Texas, unit. read more

By Benoit Faucon
Last Update: 8:19 AM ET Sep 27, 2007

LONDON (MarketWatch) — Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSB.LN) Thursday signed a deal with OAO Tatneft, Russia’s sixth-largest oil producer by volume, to develop a major tar sands project in Tatarstan, its home region, and paved the way for other potential projects.

The deal follows an alliance signed by Shell in July with Russian state-controlled oil company OAO Rosneft for oil and gas production and refining in Russia and abroad.

Under the agreement setting the principles of a strategic partnership, the two companies will devise a program for heavy oil development in Tatarstan, Shell said. read more

MELBOURNE, Sept 27 Asia Pulse – Woodside Petroleum Ltd’s (ASX:WPL) existing African portfolio is facing the chop after the oil and gas producer decided to sell its troubled Mauritania assets to Malaysian-government owned group Petroliam Nasional Berhad.

The oil and gas producer said the $US418 million ($A477.52 million) sale would include all of Woodside’s onshore and offshore producing, development and exploration interests in the African country.

Woodside’s $1 billion Chinguetti project in Mauritania has been a constant thorn in the side for the company since it began production early last year. read more

Martyn Wingrove, Lloyds List
Published: Sep 27, 2007

OIL and gas exports from the new terminals on Sakhalin Island will not begin until well into the first half of next year due to construction and commissioning delays on Russia’s largest offshore project.

The Gazprom-led Sakhalin Energy Investment company continues to build and commission the oil and gas pipelines that run along the length of the east Russian island, but construction has been more complex than anticipated.

The consortium, which includes Shell, Mitsui and Mitsubishi, has installed two new platforms and built two export terminals and offshore pipelines as part of the Sakhalin II project. read more

By Isabel Gorst and Ed Crooks in London
Published: September 27 2007 03:00 | Last updated: September 27 2007 03:00

Lawmakers in Kazakhstan have approved a bill to empower the state to annul natural resource contracts, strengthening the oil-rich Central Asian republic’s hand in its dispute with foreign oil groups led by Eni of Italy at the Kashagan field in the Caspian Sea.

The Majilis, Kazakhstan’s parliament, yesterday voted unanimously for an amendment to the natural resource law to allow the government to cancel or introduce retrospective changes to contracts perceived to harm the national economic interest. read more

By Ed Crooks in London
Published: September 27 2007 03:00 | Last updated: September 27 2007 03:00

Chevron, the second-largest US oil company, is to spend $15bn on its own shares within the next three years, extending a $5bn-a-year programme that began in 2005.

The move reflects big oil companies’ difficulties in finding uses for their large cash flows, boosted by high oil prices.

Some of Chevron’s rivals among the “big five” international oil companies have been returning even larger sums to shareholders. read more

By DAVID L. STERN
Published: September 27, 2007

ALMATY, Kazakhstan, Sept. 26 — The Kazakhstan Parliament took steps on Wednesday to grant the government the right to alter or cancel international energy contracts unilaterally should they run counter to the country’s interests.

The lower house of Parliament — in which all elected seats belong to the Nur Otan Party of President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev — voted unanimously to amend an existing law on subsoil use, spelling out the steps the government could take if a contract failed to live up to its economic promise. The upper house is also dominated by the president’s party and is expected to follow suit. read more

Zimbabweans line up to receive food aid 

By Sophie Arie
Last Updated: 2:28am BST 27/09/2007

Half of Zimbabwe’s people will be dependent on emergency food aid next year, a senior British diplomatic source has said, in a damning indictment of President Robert Mugabe’s regime.

Of an estimated eight million Zimbabweans still in the country, “we know we’ll be feeding four million people by January or February, possibly more”, the official said.  

He estimated that since Mr Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms in 2000, the population has fallen from 12 million to eight million. read more

27 Sep 2007 | 01:13 AM ET

BEIJING (XFN-ASIA) – PetroChina Co Ltd (HK 0857), the country’s largest oil and gas producer, has started building a liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Dalian, in northeastern China’s Liaoning province, the Dalian Daily reported.

The project includes an LNG terminal, a wharf and a gas pipeline, and will involve a total investment of over 10 bln yuan, the paper said.

Of the total, the LNG terminal will require investment of 6.86 bln yuan. It has initial receiving capacity of 3 mln tons per year. read more

OCTOBER 1, 2007 
NEWS & INSIGHTS
By David Kiley

Even as it pockets billions in subsidies, it’s trying to keep E85 out of drivers’ tanks

For some industries, the prospect of $3.5 billion in federal subsidies now, and double that in three years, might be a powerful incentive. But not, apparently, for the oil industry, which is seeing crude oil prices soar to record highs. Despite collecting billions for blending small amounts of ethanol with gas, oil companies seem determined to fight the spread of E85, a fuel that is 85% ethanol and 15% gas. Congress has set a target of displacing 15% of projected annual gasoline use with alternative fuels by 2017. Right now, wider availability of E85 is the likeliest way to get there. read more

By Ed Crooks
Published: September 26 2007 03:00 | Last updated: September 26 2007 03:00

BP shares fell yesterday after the Financial Times reported that Tony Hayward, chief executive, had told staff that thecompany’s revenues in the third quarter had been “dreadful”.

He also told employees at a “town hall” meeting in Houston to expect a restructuring of the company to reduce its complexity and raise efficiency.

His comments were reported in an internal note of the meeting that was leaked to the FT. The shares fell 17p to 572½p. read more

By Chris Hughes
Published: September 26 2007 03:00 | Last updated: September 26 2007 03:00

Tony Hayward, the new chief executive of BP, was naïve when he lambasted a hundred senior executives for the company’s “dreadful” operating performance and assumed the comment would not leak out. But this should not be a hanging offence.

Details of Mr Hayward’s frank pep-talk were revealed in the FT yesterday. BP’s share price duly slid as investors feared that he was conveying new information about the company’s forthcoming third-quarter results. Had that been true, Mr Hayward would have committed a serious gaffe. Price-sensitive information should be conveyed to the market in an orderly way – not in ad hoc briefings of senior staff. read more

Wed Sep 26, 2007 8:17 AM ET
By Fredrik Dahl and Edmund Blair

TEHRAN (Reuters) – When a Western bank suddenly suspended the account of her family freight firm, Nazila Noebashari revived a financial practice she thought long gone: she sent staff to the Afghan border to collect $50,000 by hand.

With foreign banks increasingly closing down business with Iranian customers in the face of U.S.-led sanctions, such physical transactions are the only way Traf Co Ltd and many other firms in Iran are staying in business. read more

ReutersPublished: September 26, 2007

ASTANA, Kazakhstan: Kazakh lawmakers passed a bill Wednesday allowing the government to unilaterally break contracts with foreign companies, potentially threatening an Italian-led consortium developing a giant oil field.

Kazakhstan has already stopped operations at the huge Kashagan oil field, run by the Italian energy firm Eni, in a conflict over mounting costs and project delays, but the legislation raises the stakes still further.

The unanimous vote in the lower house of Parliament gave the state extra leverage over Eni and its main partners, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips as talks over Kashagan enter their final stage ahead of an Oct. 22 deadline. read more

By Nariman Gizitdinov

Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) — Kazakhstan’s lower chamber of parliament approved changing a law to let the government cancel contracts with oil companies, raising the stakes in a dispute with Eni SpA over the Kashagan venture.

“The new amendments were approved unanimously without any changes,” Yerlan Nigmatulin, a lower-chamber deputy and member of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s NurOtan party, said today in an interview from the capital, Astana. The amendments are expected to be approved by the upper chamber tomorrow and then signed by the president, he said. read more