OIL giant SHELL stunned experts yesterday by bidding to boost its reserves with a £1billion gamble on Mozambique in East Africa.“This shows how desperate Shell are to boost reserves,” said one expert.

Shell’s £1bn Africa punt

Thursday, February 23, 2012

OIL giant SHELL stunned experts yesterday by bidding to boost its reserves with a £1billion gamble on Mozambique in East Africa.

It revealed a 195p per share offer for COVE ENERGY which holds an 8.5 per cent stake in one of the world’s biggest gas fields there.

It contains the equivalent in gas of more than TWO BILLION barrels of oil.

“This shows how desperate Shell are to boost reserves,” said one expert. Cove shares raced 25 per cent to 193.5p.

East Africa is one of the fastest growing frontiers for oil and gas exploration. Shell’s offer is one of only a handful of deals in the past decade. read more

US diplomat convinced by Saudi expert that reserves of world’s biggest oil exporter have been overstated by nearly 40%

John Vidal, environment editor: Tuesday 8 February 2011 22.00 GMT

Saudi oil refinery. WikiLeaks cables suggest the amount of oil that can be retrieved has been overestimated. Photograph: George Steinmetz/Corbis

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom’s crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%. read more

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MAY 29, 2009, 9:53 A.M. ET

Edited Press Release

AMSTERDAM (Dow Jones)–The Stichting Shell Reserves Compensation Foundation Today announces Friday that the Amsterdam Court of Appeals has declared the Non-U.S. Settlement Agreement concerning the recategorisation by Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSB.LN) of certain of its oil and gas reserves binding.

The agreement provides relief in the amount of US$352.6 million to qualifying non-U.S. shareholders who bought Shell shares on any stock exchange outside the United States from 8 April 1999 through 18 March 2004. read more

In 2004, Royal Dutch Shell PLC disclosed that it had overstated its reserves by 20%, leading to the ouster of its chairman, a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation and closer scrutiny of reserve calculations across the industry.

China, the world's second-biggest oil user, is expediting projects including nuclear power plants, gas pipelines and oil refineries to help stimulate the domestic economy and meet future energy demand. The country will overtake the U.S. as the world's biggest oil and gas consumer in about five years, Royal Dutch Shell Plc said in September.

Skrebowski predicts that global oil production will peak in the period 2011-2013 and then decline steadily, with non-conventional sources such as tar sands failing to fill the gap in time to avoid a serious energy crunch.

The US regulator has been reviewing the regulations on the way reserves are calculated since 2004, when Shell fell foul of its rules and was forced to "lose" a quarter of its assets. The move led to fines, a plunging share price and the exit of its chairman, Sir Philip Watts. In June the SEC issued new proposals that would allow previously excluded resources such as oil sands to be "classified" as oil and gas reserves. They would also allow companies to disclose their "probable" and "possible" reserves as well as "proved" reserves, as at present.

The world's second-largest non-government-controlled oil company by market value, Royal Dutch Shell, is likely to benefit most among the oil majors, analysts said. The company invested heavily in squeezing crude from bitumen-soaked soil in Alberta, and in extracting gas locked in coal beds in Australia and China, as it sought to rebuild its asset base after a reserves overbooking scandal in 2004.

Aug. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Cnooc Ltd.'s first-half profit growth may be double that of Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc after China's third-largest oil company increased its crude reserves and output amid record prices.

The largest fine – £17m – was issued to Royal Dutch Shell for market abuse. The FSA cited Shell's "unprecedented misconduct" after it mis-stated its reserves.

This means that the huge profits being made by multi-nationals such as Shell or ExxonMobil may turn out to be their last hurrah. "The days of the international oil companies are coming to a glorious end," said Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, last month. "Their reserves are declining and they will have difficulty accessing new ones."

The Arctic holds as much as 90bn barrels of undiscovered oil and has as much undiscovered gas as all the reserves known to exist in Russia, US government scientists have said in the first governmental assessment of the region’s resources.

A £4m fine would be the fourth largest ever levied by the watchdog. The record was £17m against Shell for mis-stating its oil reserves.

In August 2004, the authority fined Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant, a total of £17 million for market abuse and breaching listing rules after the oil group overstated the level of its oil reserves.

Shell's process is complicated. The company plans to insert electric heaters hundreds of feet into the ground to heat the oil shale to between 650 degrees and 700 degrees for more than two years.

Shell, by nearly all accounts the industry leader in oil shale research, landed three of the leases.