Shell, Exxon Look to Profit From Capturing Customers’ Carbon Emissions

Big oil companies are exploring charging for carbon storage, hoping to benefit from the drive to reduce emissions

By Sarah McFarlane: April 19, 2021 5:30 am ET

Oil companies have for decades made money by extracting carbon from the ground. Now they are trying to make money putting it back.

Energy giants such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC are pushing carbon capture and storage—where carbon is gathered and buried underground—as part of a drive to reduce both their own and their customers’ emissions. Executives say the service could become a new source of income when the industry is grappling with how to adapt to a lower-carbon economy. read more

Fossil fuel multinational Shell does not believe it will ever pay the Australian government a cent in resource taxes for the gas it draws from the country’s biggest gas project, Gorgon.

The projection about taxes on the gas, which is likely to be sold for billions of dollars a year, is contained in the company’s latest annual report, released last month, and was first reported by energy news website Boilingcold.

It covers both Gorgon – a project off the West Australian coast that when fully operational is expected to provide 15.6m tonnes of gas a year – and Shell’s smaller Prelude project, a floating gas facility that also sits off WA. read more

Shell predicts free gas forever from Gorgon and Prelude LNG projects

by Peter Milne | Mar 31, 2021 | Energy & Environment

Shell’s accountants predict the Dutch giant will never pay Australia for gas extracted at the Gorgon and Prelude LNG projects that it can sell for up to about $4 billion a year. Peter Milne from independent energy and climate news site Boiling Cold has the story.

Dutch giant Shell forecasts it will never pay Australia for oil and gas extracted for the Gorgon and Prelude LNG projects that it can sell for up to almost $4 billion a year. read more

Shell has written down the value of some of its gas assets, including its Queensland Curtis project in Australia.

As the Shift to Green Energy Speeds Up, Shell’s Big Natural-Gas Bet Is at Risk. The fuel faces growing environmental scrutiny and competition from cleaner energy sources

By Sarah McFarlane: March 27, 2021 5:30 am ET

LONDON— Royal Dutch Shell PLC bet big on natural gas as the energy source of the future when it bought BG Group for $54 billion. Five years later, it appears the gas era won’t last long. read more

Shell hunts for hydrogen opportunities in Australia in net zero push

Shell Australia Chair Tony Nunan said the company sees hydrogen and carbon capture and storage as essential to the company’s net zero ambitions, and Australia is well placed to be competitive in both of those technologies.

Australia, like its biggest coal and gas customers China, Japan and South Korea, has mapped out a hydrogen strategy, with plans to become an exporter by 2030, using its vast wind and solar resources to produce “green” hydrogen and natural gas and carbon capture for “blue” hydrogen. read more

Hundreds of workers sacked by text at Shell’s Gnagarri solar farm read more

Prelude: A year of working dangerously

Mark Tilly: Journalist: 05 February 2021

“…unions allege a culture of silence that keeps many other incidents unreported thanks to employees’ fear of reprisals.: One complainant filed in April, 2020 said they had been “intimidated and pressured by numerous phone calls and messages from representatives of the Shell company…”

SHELL’s floating LNG facility made headlines last year for all the wrong reasons, after a spate of technical issues forced the multi-billion dollar facility to halt production and cease sending cargoes for almost a year just months after it finally started up. read more

LNG production at Shell’s Prelude gas processing plant in Western Australia restarts following 11-month closure

“As for making money from this project, that’s extremely unlikely because the cost overruns and completion delays are in the horrendous category,”…

Key points:

• The facility was shutdown for 11 months after electrical and safety problems
• Some analysts hold concerns about the facility’s economic and environmental performance
• Shell has never revealed the cost of constructing Prelude

Liquified natural gas (LNG) production has restarted this month on the world’s largest floating object, Shell’s half-kilometre long Prelude gas processing facility.

The restart is much-needed good news after an 11-month shutdown following a technical issue only described as an “electrical trip” by Shell, and three incidents that the offshore energy regulator NOPSEMA described as “dangerous occurrences”. read more

MYSTERY OVER SUDDEN DIVERSION OF LNG TANKERS BOUND FOR SHELL’S TROUBLED PRELUDE FLNG 

Extracts from Reuters article – Two LNG tankers bound for Australia’s Prelude facility divert..

It is not clear why the ships changed their destinations from Prelude…: Shell declined to comment on the matter.

EXTRACTS FROM RELATED SPECULATION BY RETIRED SENIOR SHELL EXPERTS

Your the wiz kid on tanker movements

….seems to me the only logical reason for such diversion of for example the Gaslog Glasgow was there was not a sufficiency of LNG to load on or around the 15 January (the first load was offtaken on 8 January) when to meet the 3.6m tonnes design output it would have been required to load around this time and I think you calculated that to meet the 3.6 mt/a  given an average LNG carrier capacity an offload would be expected every circa 7 –  10 days,… read more

UPDATE 1-Two LNG tankers bound for Australia’s Prelude facility divert-shiptracking data

By Reuters Staff: JANUARY 19, 2021

(Adds comment from Shell)

SINGAPORE, Jan 19 (Reuters) – Two liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers that had initially signalled they would load at Royal Dutch Shell’s Prelude floating LNG facility in Australia have diverted elsewhere, shiptracking data showed on Tuesday.

This comes just a week after Shell said that Prelude would resume loading cargoes after production had been suspended for nearly a year following an electrical trip. read more

Two LNG Tankers Bound for Australia’s Prelude Facility Divert

Jessica Jaganathan January 19, 2021

Two liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers that had initially signaled they would load at Royal Dutch Shell’s Prelude floating LNG facility in Australia have diverted elsewhere, ship-tracking data showed on Tuesday.

This comes just a week after Shell said that Prelude would resume loading cargoes after production had been suspended for nearly a year following an electrical trip.

The facility loaded its first cargo since coming back online on Jan. 8 onto the LNG tanker Symphonic Breeze which delivered its shipment into Japan on Monday. read more

Australia’s Prelude FLNG shipments resume: Shell

Published date: 11 January 2021

Cargo shipments have resumed at the 3.6mn t/yr Prelude floating LNG (FLNG) offshore Western Australia (WA), around 11 months after it went off line in February 2020 because of technical issues.

“LNG cargoes have resumed from Shell’s Prelude FLNG facility,” said operator Shell.

Prelude FLNG in the Browse basin has been plagued by technical issues since it started shipments in June 2019. read more

Prelude was planned as a flagship floating LNG project for the Anglo-Dutch supermajor. Like most other large-scale offshore LNG projects, however, it ran into delays and cost overruns.

Shell Restarts Production At Huge Prelude Project As LNG Prices Soar

By Irina Slav – Jan 11, 2021, 11:00 AM CST

Shell has restarted production of liquefied natural gas at its Prelude offshore project in Australia after almost a year’s suspension.

“LNG cargoes have resumed from Shell’s Prelude FLNG facility,” Argus reported, citing a company statement. read more

“Prelude has been a ‘white elephant’…

Shell resumes gas shipments from world’s largest floating structure

Jamie Smyth in Sydney: 11 Jan 2021

The restart of the huge Prelude facility — which at 488 metres is longer than four football fields — is a welcome boost for Shell as it coincides with a record surge in LNG prices fuelled by a cold snap in Asia. But construction challenges, cost overruns and technical problems with Prelude, as well as challenging market conditions, have prompted Shell and other producers to cancel other FLNG projects. “Prelude has been a ‘white elephant’ — we always felt it was a technology looking for a solution rather than the other way round,” said Neil Beveridge, an analyst at Bernstein. read more

Shell sells Australian LNG project stake to GIP in $2.5B deal

Big carbon? Oil majors turn to nature to help plug revenue gap

By Shadia Nasralla:DECEMBER 8, 20205:06 AM

LONDON (Reuters) – Oil companies such as BP and Shell are nurturing nature as a future revenue stream, betting on an expected rise in carbon credit prices as their fossil fuel profits ebb.

European oil majors say investing in projects to create more credits is simply good business, offering new revenue streams at a time when oil prices have collapsed and appetite for new exploration evaporates. read more