* No timeframe for resuming output at Shell’s Prelude FLNG

* Outage keeps Prelude LNG off amid market glut (Adds background on Prelude)

MELBOURNE, Feb 18 (Reuters) – Royal Dutch Shell has temporarily suspended cargo liftings from its Prelude floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility off northwest Australia while it works to restore production following an electrical trip on Feb. 2.

“Work continues to restore full operations on Prelude, our floating LNG facility in Australia,” the energy giant said in an emailed statement on Tuesday. read more

FEBRUARY 17, 2020 / 9:28 PM

YENAGOA, Nigeria, Feb 17 (Reuters) – Nigeria’s state oil company and its joint venture partners have spent $360 million on cleaning up the Niger Delta oil heartland in the past two years, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said on Monday, but locals said little work had been done.

Nigeria is Africa’s biggest crude oil exporter. Oil sales account for around 90% of its foreign currency earnings but oil spills in the southern Niger Delta region have caused pollution and angered locals. read more

Shell will buy and trade electricity from what’s claimed to be Europe’s biggest battery storage project currently being built by Chinese players in the UK, in another big step by the oil group into the power sector.

Shell Energy Europe signed a multi-year offtake deal for output from the 100MW/100MWh Minety storage project in southwest England, underway under a collaboration between China Huaneng Group and Chinese sovereign wealth fund CNIC.

Power from the project, designed to balance intermittent wind and solar output on the UK grid, will be traded by Shell’s specialist Limejump subsidiary, which is claimed to manage the largest network of batteries in the UK. read more

FEBRUARY 17, 2020

LONDON, Feb 17 (Reuters) –

* Shell Energy Europe Limited, the energy marketing and trading division of Royal Dutch Shell has agreed a multi-year supply deal for power from a battery storage project in southwest England, the company said on Monday.

* The two 50-MW batteries will enable Shell Energy Europe and its subsidiary Limejump to use renewable power in the area, the firm said.

* When fully charged, a 100-MW battery could hold 100 megawatt hours of electricity, enough to power about 10,000 homes for a day before being recharged. read more

Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump’s top energy official said he’s confident that Russia won’t be able to complete the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea — and signaled that the U.S. will press forward with its opposition to the project.

Asked about Russian efforts to circumvent U.S. sanctions on the pipeline by completing it on its own, U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said “they can’t” — and dismissed claims that project owner Gazprom PJSC will face only a short delay. read more

By Nick Cunningham – Feb 15, 2020, 2:00 PM CST

Protests continue to swell over the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline, a long-distance pipeline carrying natural gas from Alberta to the Pacific Coast.

The pipeline’s route would travel more than 400 miles to the coast at Kitimat, British Columbia, where it intends to deliver gas to a massive LNG export project, under construction by a joint venture led by Royal Dutch Shell.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) began arresting indigenous peoples on their territory earlier this month. “Forcing indigenous peoples off their own territory is in complete and disgusting violation of the United Nations Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples,” Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs said in early February. read more

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) says the failed Ogoni cleanup exercise under the management of the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) has received a total of US$350,000,000 (Three Hundred and Fifty Million U.S. Dollars) since 2017 without anything to show for it.

Lamenting the corruption and looting going on in HYPREP yesterday (February 14, 2020) during a briefing in his office in Bori, headquarter of Khana local government area,  President of MOSOP, Fegalo Nsuke said it was unfortunate that an overwhelming $350million, an estimated NGN128,000,000,000 (One hundred and twenty eight billion Naira) meant for the cleanup has been largely misappropriated due to the massive corruption in HYPREP. read more

SINGAPORE, Feb 14 (Reuters) – Shell said on Friday a contractor working at its Singapore refinery had contracted coronavirus, as the city state reported its biggest jump in new cases so far.

The oil giant said earlier it had sent some staff home from its main office in Singapore after discovering another employee had been in contact with a carrier.

The company said its operations at both locations had been unaffected by the incidents.

Singapore on Friday reported 9 new cases of the virus, its biggest increase to date and bringing the total to 67. The city-state has one of the highest tallies of the disease outside China. read more

FEBRUARY 14, 2020

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Shell said on Friday it had identified an employee at its main Singapore office who had been in contact with a coronavirus case and had advised other staff close to him to work from home.

The firm did not say how many staff it had impacted at its office in The Metropolis building.

“Shell can confirm that an employee who works at The Metropolis has been identified as having close contact with a COVID-19 case who tested positive this morning,” a spokesperson for the firm said in an emailed statement. read more

Royal Dutch Shell PLC is expanding an online program that teaches its employees artificial-intelligence skills, part of an effort to cut costs, improve business processes and generate revenue.

The Anglo-Dutch oil company, which has about 82,000 employees, said about 2,000 have expressed interest in or have been approached by management about taking AI courses through online-education company Udacity Inc. They include petroleum engineers, chemists and geophysicists, among others.

The courses are voluntary, not required, and employees can complete them at their own pace during work hours, Shell said. The oil company covers the cost of the training. read more

* Draft law circulating, split into two bills

* Expected to be presented next week

* “Operators in Nigeria are waiting” – Total

By Libby George

ABUJA, Nigeria Feb 14 (Reuters) – A Nigerian oil reform two decades in the making is urgently needed to get money into its energy sector, industry executives say, as tax increases and regulatory uncertainty scupper investments.

Africa’s largest oil exporting nation has not carried out a full revamp of the law underpinning its oil and gas sector since the 1960s. Piecemeal tax hikes, and a growing lack of certainty around terms, have made companies wary. read more

Featured below are extracts from negative customer reviews about Shell Energy posted during the last few days on Trustpilot.  Visit the Shell Energy page on Trustpilot to view all reviews in their entirety, positive and negative (and Shell Energy responses). Watch out for any fake reviews. Note the reoccurring themes in the negative reviews, including difficulty in communicating with the company. This article posted 13 Feb 2020.

Truely awful, avoid at all cost

Truely awful. Takes very long to answer phones every time, no matter what day of week. I bought a house and received estimated bills. When I tried to update the reading, it keeps saying on the system it’s invalid. But they wouldn’t listen that I haven’t moved in yet. And of course I keep getting estimated bills which are way higher than they should be. read more

BP’s new boss set out the boldest climate goal of any major oil company, pledging Wednesday to eliminate almost all of the carbon emissions from BP operations and the fuel it sells to customers.

Bernard Looney, who has been the company’s chief executive for just a week, set an ambitious agenda for what’s becoming an existential challenge for the oil industry. While peers such as Royal Dutch Shell, Total and Equinor have responded to investor pressure by adopting targets for emissions curbs, none has promised to zero out all emissions from the fossil fuels they pump from the ground. read more

BP’s pledge to zero out all its carbon emissions by 2050 deepens the divide between major European and American oil producers on climate change, increasing the pressure for Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. to do more.

The U.S. giants have committed only to reducing greenhouse gases from their own operations. On Wednesday, BP followed Royal Dutch Shell and Equinor in pledging to offset the carbon emissions from the fuels they sell. Known as Scope 3, the emissions from cars, homes and factories are responsible for 90% of fossil fuel pollution. read more

BP Boss Looney Sets Out to ‘Reinvent’ Oil Giant With Zero Carbon Goal

Reuters: Feb. 12, 2020

LONDON — BP set one of the oil sector’s most ambitious targets for curbing carbon emissions on Wednesday as new chief executive Bernard Looney began the biggest revamp in its 111-year history.

While investor groups welcomed the 2050 targets set out by Looney, which put BP ahead of rivals Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Equinor and all of the U.S. oil majors, environmental campaigners criticized a lack of detail.

“We have got to change and change profoundly because the world is changing fast and so are society’s expectations of us,” Looney said in his first major speech as CEO, after earlier highlighting a need to “reinvent BP”. read more

BP, Shell, Chevron and Exxon have made almost $2tn in profits in the past three decades as their exploitation of oil, gas and coal reserves has driven the planet to the brink of climate breakdown, according to analysis for the Guardian.

The scale of their profits is revealed as experts say the fossil fuel boom is coming to an end, with big oil entering a “death knell” phase, according to one prominent Wall St commentator.

Analysis for the Guardian by Taxpayers for Common Sense in the US reveals that since 1990 – at which point the impact of fossil fuel extraction on the climate had been well known to industry leaders and politicians for years, experts say – the big four companies have accumulated $1.991tn in profits. read more