News and information on Shell Plc
By BENOIT FAUCON: Feb. 17, 2016
Royal Dutch Shell PLC said Wednesday it had started the process of repaying $2 billion in oil-related debts owed to Iran, easing a key hurdle to doing business there now that western sanctions have been lifted.
“Following the lifting of applicable EU and U.S. sanctions, we can confirm that the process for paying Shell’s outstanding debt to [state-run National Iranian Oil Co.] has started,” the Shell spokesman said.
By John Donovan
In June 2015, we published an article by a regular contributor under the headline: Curious coincidence involving Shell, Iran, Noble Corp and $2.16 billion
I was contacted recently by a gentleman who carried out work on the infamous Noble Discoverer drillship, which may currently be up for sale in Singapore.
He recently read the article and based on his insider knowledge, says that it would explain a lot.
He claims that a colleague working on the rig speculated, even before the publication of our article, that the Discoverer was part of a giant money laundering scheme.
The price tumbled as much as 3 per cent during trading yesterday when it emerged Iraq had produced a record high of oil and may even raise output further.
The news comes as the market is already braced for more supply from Iran after sanctions were lifted.
Tankers have begun to leave Iran’s ports and it agreed its first deal with a European company last week with Greece’s refinery Hellenic Petroleum.
Some analysts expect Iran to increase production to between 3million and 4million barrels a day. Iraq’s fields produced more than 4.1million barrels a day.
Brent crude fell 4.1% to $30.86 a barrel following a 10% rise on Friday, while US oil shed 4.7% to $30.68.
The slide came as the head of Opec called for all oil-producing nations to work together.
Abdullah al-Badri said both Opec and non-Opec oil producers needed to tackle oversupply to help prices rise.
“It is vital the market addresses the issue of the stock overhang. As you can see from previous cycles, once this overhang starts falling then prices start to rise,” he told a conference in London.
By James Skinner – Tuesday, 19 January, 2016
All that remains for Shell’s (LSE: RDSB) takeover of BG Group (LSE: BG) to become a done deal is for shareholders to vote it through at the end of this month (AGM).
I’m now having second thoughts about this, partly as a result of last week’s news, which saw Standard Life announce that it will vote against the merger at the upcoming meeting.
This announcement has prompted me to stop for a moment and ask if the transaction still makes sense.
Hazel Sheffield: 18 JAN 2016
Not everyone agreed with the RAC when it said that petrol could become cheaper than bottled water.
RAC wagered that if the price of oil slid below $20 barrel, it could push petrol prices to 90p a litre – while a fall to $10 a barrel or less could see petrol sold at 86p a litre, or cheaper than a bottle of water.
But only if you are a water snob, according to the Hydration Council, who emailed us to say that the average price of a litre bottle of water, purchased in a multi-pack, is 38p. Take that, Perrier drinkers.
Shell will on Wednesday become the first major oil producer to announce annual earnings as it enters the final stages of its plan to buy BG Group Plc in the industry’s biggest deal in years. Investors will scrutinize those preliminary numbers for signs Europe’s largest oil company is doing enough to justify the acquisition as crude drops below $30 a barrel.
Shell has cut thousands of jobs and reduced spending as Chief Executive Officer Ben Van Beurden prepares the company for a prolonged downturn while looking to BG to add production and cash flow. The 18-month slump in crude, the longest since the mid-1980s, has delayed $380 billion of investments in the industry, driven down profits and erased more than $2.7 trillion of oil companies’ market value.
Jan 16 2016
Royal Dutch Shell on Saturday denied a report in Iranian media that it had sent representatives to Iran ahead of the expected lifting of international sanctions.
Iran’s Mehr news agency had earlier reported that Shell and French oil major Total had sent executives to Tehran, and were due to meet officials from the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) on Sunday.
International sanctions on Iran were expected to be lifted on Saturday under the terms of a nuclear deal agreed last year, and Iran freed four U.S. prisoners. Iran has pledged to ramp up its oil production shortly after sanctions are lifted.
TEHRAN, Jan. 16 (MNA) – Representatives of several world’s oil giants have traveled to Iran on the verge of the removal of international sanctions.
A few days before the cancellation of international sanctions against Iran, a number of the largest oil companies including the Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell company and France’s Total Corporation have sent representatives to Iran in order to negotiation with Iranian oil authorities.
Accordingly, the visiting representatives are scheduled to hold talks with the officials of National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) as well as National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) on Sunday discussing venues for boosting bilateral ties.
After U.S. crude prices broke below $30 per barrel for the first time in 15 years, the market is asking how low oil futures can go? Most analyses see it rebounding in the back half of 2016, but crude faces significant headwinds in the coming months, experts told CNBC.
On Monday, Morgan Stanley joined Goldman Sachs in saying oil prices could dip to $20, and a number of major banks cut their crude cost outlook this week. Standard Chartered even raised the specter of $10 oil.
Oil as low as $20 — and perhaps even lower — is indeed possible, said Matt Smith, ClipperData’s director of commodity research.
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS: A version of this article appears in print on January 7, 2016, on page B2 of the New York edition
The decline in the global Brent oil benchmark price to below $35 a barrel, the lowest level since the depths of the 2008-9 economic downturn and a decline of nearly two-thirds since summer 2014, helped push stock markets lower.
The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, the main benchmark for the United States stock market, declined 1.3 percent Wednesday and breached the psychologically important 2,000 level to close at 1,990.26.
TEHRAN, Jan. 04 (MNA) – Iran’s NIOC and Anglo-Dutch Shell have reached the final agreement on how to settle the outstanding 2.3-billion-dollar debt.
Upon conducting several negotiations between officials of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and the Anglo–Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, the two sides eventually reached a consensus of how to pay off the unpaid debt worth 2.3 billion dollars.
Seyed Mohsen Ghamsari, Executive Director for International Affairs at National Iranian Oil Company, confirmed the reaching of an accord with the Shell oil company adding “the resumption of Iran’s crude oil sales to the company remains subject to the payment of previous debts.”
If one were Shell and BG directors clutching at straws, seeking to force through a £47billion merger forged in the midst of a dramatic correction in oil prices, you might breathe a sigh of relief at a 2 per cent rebound in Brent crude to $37 a barrel in latest trading.
The very idea, however, that the proponents of one of the UK’s biggest ever mergers is relying on the hope and the prayer of a recovery in crude prices to about $60 to make any economic sense of the combination is illustration of the flimsiness of this deal.
By Tyler Durden
Extracts from extracts…
We believe that crude oil prices could fall further unless global oil production is reduced. As shown in Table 2, we estimate that the global oil market could be oversupplied by roughly 920,000 bpd in 2016. The key assumptions are year-over-year growth in global demand of 1.2 million bpd, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Libya hold production at current levels, Iran ramps up production at moderate pace over the course of the year and the U.S. rig count remains at current levels.
Total SA, Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Lukoil PJSC are among international companies that have selected oil and natural gas deposits to develop in Iran as the holder of the world’s fourth-largest crude reserves presents $30 billion worth of projects to investors.
Total is one of the companies that have been in the forefront of discussions and Eni SpA is also looking to invest, Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said. Shell, Total and Lukoil all specified fields they would be interested in developing in Iran, Ali Kardor, deputy director of investment and financing at National Iranian Oil Co. said in an interview in Tehran.
Robin Pagnamenta
EBOOK TITLE: “SIR HENRI DETERDING AND THE NAZI HISTORY OF ROYAL DUTCH SHELL” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
EBOOK TITLE: “JOHN DONOVAN, SHELL’S NIGHTMARE: MY EPIC FEUD WITH THE UNSCRUPULOUS OIL GIANT ROYAL DUTCH SHELL” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
EBOOK TITLE: “TOXIC FACTS ABOUT SHELL REMOVED FROM WIKIPEDIA: HOW SHELL BECAME THE MOST HATED BRAND IN THE WORLD” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
See our link list of over 500 articles by the FT, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, Forbes, Dow Jones Newswires, New York Times, CNBC etc, plus UK House of Commons Select Committee Hansard records, information on U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission website etc. all containing references to our Shell focussed websites, or our website founders Alfred and John Donovan. Includes TV documentary features in English and German, newspaper and magazine articles, radio interviews, newsletters etc. Plus academic papers, Stratfor intelligence reports and UK, U.S. and Australian state/parliamentary publications, also citing our Shell websites. Click on this link to see the entire list, all in date order with a link to an index of over 100 books also containing references to our non-profit websites and/or our activities.
John Donovan, the website owner
This is not a Shell website. That fact should be abundantly plain from the overall content of this home page and our sister Shell focussed websites, including shellnazihistory.com. Click on the Disclaimer link at top of this page for more information. You Can Be Sure Shell does not endorse or approve of this website. There are no subscription charges nor do we solicit or accept donations. No advertising is accepted. It is an entirely free to use non-commercial website drawing attention to the negative side of Shell. The Shell logo image with the white text used on this website, as per the above example, is in the public domain because its copyright has expired and its author is anonymous. It can be found here on WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. Use this link for Shell’s own website.
