Posts on ‘December 23rd, 2006’

December 24, 2006 BP’s Lord Browne has had an annus horribilis but there may be worse to come in 2007, with probes of the company’s safety record and a looming battle to succeed him. Dominic Rushe reports    The holiday season is a time for reflection. And 2006 has certainly given Lord Browne of Madingley [...]

December 24, 2006 Paolo Scaroni headed the glassmaker Pilkington for six years. Now he is cutting deals with the Russians as boss of the Italian energy giant Eni. Why is he jumping in where others fear to go?    JAWS dropped when Paolo Scaroni, the former Pilkington glass boss, was appointed head of Italy’s energy [...]

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 24/12/2006 Vladimir Putin is making himself our problem. There is a difference between persecuting political opponents at home and doing so in neighbouring states; between presiding over the murder of dissidents within your borders and sanctioning their death abroad. The moral distinction may be slight, but the legal distinction is vast: [...]

(From right: Jeroen van der Veer of Royal Dutch Shell, Yuri Trutnev, Russia’s resources minister, and Stanislav Tsygankov of Gazprom) Melissa Kite and Nicholas Holdsworth in Moscow, Last Updated: 12:37am GMT 24/12/2006 Russia’s use of energy supplies as a political weapon should be a wake-up call to Britain and the West to deal urgently with [...]

By Upstream staff Anglo-Dutch supermajor Shell’s chief executive Jeroen van der Veer said that the sale of half the company’s interest in Russia’s Sakhalin 2 project to Gazprom would have an impact on its reserves. “Of course there’s a short-term impact on the reserves, the reserve bookings themselves, but when I look at the future [...]

Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada’s oil and gas industry Week of December 24, 2006 By Gary Park Shell Canada is rapidly occupying the leading edge of Alberta oil sands growth. Already the only major producer with holdings in the three largest regions — Athabasca, Cold Lake and Peace River — it has filed [...]

ASSOCIATED PRESS By Dan Udoh 8:50 a.m. December 23, 2006 PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria – A car bomb exploded outside a state government office in Nigeria’s southern oil hub Saturday, soon after the military reported an overnight bombing of a water pipeline leading into a refinery. The blast at the office building in Port Harcourt was [...]

By Simon Bowers Shell’s sale of half of its interest in Sakhalin-2 will result in a “fairly dramatic impact” on the Anglo-Dutch group’s production in years to come, according to analysts. Jon Rigby, at UBS, wiped 7.4%, or 330,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, off his forecast for reported production in 2015. The deal, [...]

Alex Brummer column By: Alex Brummer, Daily Mail – London: KRTBN Published: Dec 22, 2006 Big oil has a long history of having assets appropriated by hostile governments. Yet no one has been quite prepared for the land grab by Gazprom of a 50pc stake in the Sakhalin-2 project. This will come as a nasty [...]

Published: Dec 23, 2006 GardaI have denied that force was used during yesterday’s early morning protest at the Corrib gas terminal in north Mayo. Lorna Siggins , Marine Correspondent, reports. Shell to Sea campaigners say that one of their local supporters was injured when a garda drew a truncheon and hit the man several times [...]

By Matthew Richards Published: December 23 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 23 2006 02:00 Shell will prove there is still such a thing as a free lunch next month when it adds £7,000 to employees’ January pay packets to compensate them for the end of paid-for meals at the Shell Centre canteen. Staff at [...]

Published: December 23 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 23 2006 02:00 For Brits, grainy footage of Neville Chamberlain clutching a piece of paper and talking about “peace in our time” captures an era when civilised chaps were flummoxed by foreign bullies. Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, returns from Moscow [...]

Crude-oil futures fell for a second straight session, settling at nearly $62 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on unseasonably warm Northeast weather and expectations of rising inventories. Here is Friday’s roundup of oil and energy news: * * * COURT WIN FOR EXXON: A federal appeals court cut in half a $5 [...]

EXTRACT: Sakhalin II: Credit Suisse analysts cut their price target on Shell’s London-listed stock, saying the deal is not financially favorable to the company. Fri Dec 22, 2006 3:11pm ET NEW YORK, Dec 22 (Reuters) – Overseas shares traded in the United States fell broadly on Friday, led by declines in shares of oil giant [...]

By James Moore Published: 23 December 2006 For Shell, the cup runneth over when it comes to cash – but the glass is looking half empty when it comes to energy reserves. The upshot of the Sakhalin-2 affair, which saw Shell and its Japanese partners giving up control of Russia’s largest energy project to Gazprom [...]