OILPRICE.COM

Shell: Britain Is Less Attractive Than The U.S. For Energy Investment

By Tsvetana Paraskova – Mar 06, 2023, 3:51 AM CST

The UK is less attractive than the United States for energy investment, due to the high windfall taxes on energy producers in Britain and the lack of incentives for clean energy investments similar in scale to the American provisions to boost green energy, Shell’s CEO Wael Sawan told The Times in an interview published on Monday.

The UK government should “take a page from some of the things that the US have done recently, through the Inflation Reduction Act,” Sawan told the newspaper.

The IRA has nearly $370 billion in climate and clean energy provisions, including investment and production credits for solar, wind, storage, critical minerals, funding for energy research, and credits for clean energy technology manufacturing such as wind turbines and solar panels.

The EU also seeks to bolster policies to support the EU’s clean technology manufacturing and preserve the bloc’s competitiveness in the face of the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and massive subsidies in China. read more

OILPRICE.COM

Shell Is Reviewing Its Plan To Reduce Oil Production This Decade

By Tsvetana Paraskova – Mar 03, 2023, 7:26 AM CST

• The CEO of Shell has said that the company’s plan to reduce oil production by up to 2% each year this decade is now under review.

• In 2021, Shell said that its oil production had peaked in 2019 and would continue to decline over the next three decades.

• Recent events have highlighted the fragility of the global energy system and now Shell wants to focus on ensuring energy supply.

Shell’s plan to have its oil production decline by up to 2% each year this decade is currently under review, the supermajor’s new CEO Wael Sawan told The Times in an interview published on Friday, adding that he is a firm believer of the statement “don’t deny people energy.”

Back in 2021, Shell said that its oil production peaked in 2019 and is set for a continual decline over the next three decades as it looks toward the renewables side of the business. read more

OILPRICE.COM

Shell Wants To Bail On Energy Retail Businesses Due To “Tough Market Conditions”

By Julianne Geiger – Jan 26, 2023, 3:30 PM CST

Shell is looking to bail on its energy retail business across multiple countries amid “tough market conditions,” the company said on Thursday.

The tough market conditions likely refer to higher wholesale prices across Europe that have plagued many retailers, as well as price-capping measures instituted by governments to keep consumers from having to pay exorbitant energy bills.

Shell said on Thursday that it had commenced a review of its retail business in Britain, Norway, and Germany and that the process could take months.

Of the three businesses, Shell’s retail operations in the UK, Shell Energy Retail, is the biggest, boasting 1.4 million customers.

But while it has pegged its European retail arms to stand before the firing squad, Shell’s 2022 annual profit is expected to come in at more than $30 billion, Reuters said, as high oil and gas prices have helped the business improve its overall performance.

Shell sunk $1.5 billion in cash and credit into its British energy retail business last year in order to help with volatile prices and the tough market conditions in the retail segment as natural gas supplies ran short. While Shell managed to survive the last couple of years, other British retailers such as Bulb declared bankruptcy after multiple British power suppliers failed to hedge their future costs back when the getting was good. The cost to taxpayers—billions. read more

oilprice.com

Shell Nearly Sold Its Norwegian Oil And Gas Assets In Late 2022

By Tsvetana Paraskova – Jan 10, 2023, 8:00 AM CST

Shell held talks last year with the biggest UK North Sea producer Harbour Energy to sell its oil and gas fields offshore Norway and some mature assets offshore the UK, but a deal ultimately couldn’t be reached due to price volatility, company sources told Reuters on Tuesday.

Shell, as well as other majors, have worked in recent years on streamlining asset portfolios to focus on the most profitable projects. Back in 2021, Shell said that its oil production peaked in 2019 and is set for a continual decline over the next three decades as it looks toward the renewables side of the business. Shell said its carbon dioxide emissions also likely peaked—a year earlier, in 2018. read more

OILPRICE.COM

Shell Slashes Refinery Output In EU As Drought Disrupts Transportation

By Julianne Geiger – Aug 19, 2022, 9:00 AM CDT

Shell slashed its refinery output at its Shell Energy and Chemicals Park Rheinland fuel-making facility as low Rhine River levels halted the flow of goods, Shell said on Thursday.

“Due to the low Rhine water level we have reduced the capacity of Shell Energy and Chemicals Park Rhineland. The situation regarding supply is challenging but carefully managed,” Shell said in an emailed statement to Reuters. read more

OILPRICE.COM

Shell Warns Of Prelude LNG Disruptions

By Irina Slav – Jun 29, 2022, 9:30 AM CDT

Prolonged labor strikes at Shell’s Prelude LNG facility will disrupt shipments from it for the next two weeks, the supermajor warned this week.

“We have issued a notice to customers that cargoes will be impacted until at least mid-July due to the industrial action,” Shell said, as quoted by Reuters.

The floating LNG production facility in northwestern Australia has an annual capacity of 3.6 million tons. The news of a halt to operations adds to an already difficult situation for gas importers after Russia reduced the flow along the Nord Stream 1 pipeline by 60 percent, and an explosion took Freeport LNG out of commission for at least three months.

This latest disruption comes just three months after an outage that shut Prelude down for four months. The strike is a response to Shell’s refusal to concede to some of the demands made by the Australian Workers’ Union. read more

OILPRICE.COM

Shell’s Brazil Wells Come Up Dry

By Irina Slav – May 17, 2022, 8:30 AM CDT

Three exploration wells that Shell has drilled in Brazil in hopes of making the next big discovery have come up dry, Bloomberg has reported, citing an analyst with Wood Mackenzie.

This latest turn of events adds to bad news for Brazil and supermajors’ plans to turn it into the next hot spot in oil.

Shell and several partners paid $1 billion for drilling rights for three offshore blocks in Brazil and spent three years drilling exploratory wells. None of them turned up commercially viable volumes of oil, Marcelo de Assis, chief of Latin America upstream research at Wood Mackenzie, told Bloomberg. read more

OILPRICE.COM

Oil And Gas Companies Will Never Truly Be Carbon Neutral

By Tsvetana Paraskova – Oct 18, 2021, 3:00 PM CDT

• Oil and gas companies are pushing a net-zero narrative, but their pledges may not live up to true carbon neutrality.
• Carbon neutral oil and gas is largely reliant on the murky world of carbon credits and carbon offsets.
• The lack of standardization and transparency within the carbon credit market has drawn a lot of criticism.

The energy transition, net-zero pledges, and increased investor pressure on oil and gas companies to slash emissions have given rise to the latest trend in energy markets—the arrival of the ‘carbon neutral’ oil barrel and the ‘carbon neutral’ liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargo.

Oil and gas firms have started to offer those so-called carbon neutral oil and gas shipments. And buyers are lapping them up as they themselves are also pressured by investors and their own carbon reduction pledges to procure lower-emission energy supply. read more

OILPRICE.COM

U.S. Utilities Could Face Slew Of Climate Lawsuits

By Leonard Hyman & William Tilles – Aug 16, 2021, 4:00 AM CDT

Several years ago, a major US electric utility, wrote in its 10-K , a document filed annually with federal securities regulators, that it could not “currently estimate the financial impact of climate policies… or litigation alleging …” damages, but admitted they could require “material capital…” (FirstEnergy, 2018 10-K. Fast forward to the 2020 document, FirstEnergy said it could not predict “timing and ultimate outcome..” of environmental actions. Not much progress.) Was that cautionary verbiage a hint? (Not being forthcoming in documents like the 10-K carries significant legal penalties, so take it seriously.) read more

OilPrice.com

Big Oil Looks To Cut Production Following Activist Backlash

By Alex Kimani – Jun 19, 2021, 6:00 PM CDT

Two weeks ago, Big Oil suffered a series of boardroom and courtroom defeats in the hands of hardline climate activists.

…a Dutch court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut its greenhouse gas emissions harder and faster than it had previously planned. Never mind the fact that Shell already had pledged to cut GHG emissions by 20% by 2030 and to net-zero by 2050. The court in The Hague determined that wasn’t good enough and has demanded a 45% cut by 2030 compared to 2019 levels. read more

Will Supermajors Finally Be Held Accountable For Oil Spills?

By Global Risk Insights – May 08, 2021, 12:00 PM CDT

A British Supreme Court ruling has brought to a head a 13-year-old battle to hold Royal Dutch Shell accountable for massive oil spills in the Niger Delta in 2008 and 2009. This creates a precedent for taking multinational corporations to trial in the home countries of their parent companies. This may mark the beginning of a more regulated global environment, in which subsidiary companies responsible for human rights abuses happening abroad could be held more accountable. Whether this will be an effective solution remains to be seen.  read more

Shell To Exhaust Dwindling Oil & Gas Reserves By 2040

By Tsvetana Paraskova – Apr 15, 2021, 3:00 PM CDT

Shell expects to have produced 75 percent of its current proved oil and gas reserves by 2030, and only around 3 percent after 2040, the supermajor said in its Energy Transition Strategy that it will put to a non-binding shareholder vote next month.

Discussing the risk of stranded assets in the energy transition, Shell said that every year it tests its oil and gas portfolio under different scenarios, including prolonged low oil prices, and cross-references assets with break-even prices to assess if they would still be viable in case of low oil and gas prices. read more

Iraq Moves To Exploit Its Massive Natural Gas Reserves

EXTRACTS

…that said, it has made some progress in developing gas resources, most notably in 2019/2020 when the US$17 billion 25-year Basra Gas Company (BGC) project with Royal Dutch Shell…

The original design plans for Nebras – formulated between Shell and the Iraq Oil Ministry and Ministry of Industry and Minerals – were for a project that could produce at least 1.8 million metric tonnes per year (mtpy) of various petrochemicals. read more

Nigeria’s Lawsuits Against Shell Could Cause Oil Major Exodus

By Viktor Katona – Mar 10, 2021, 1:00 PM CST

Judging from recent headlines, Nigeria has unleashed one of the most spectacular legal attacks on one of its key oil and gas investors, to an extent previously unseen in the country’s more than 60 years of hydrocarbon production. Shell has been active in Nigeria ever since the African country opened up to international investment in the early 1960s, maintaining its position as one of the leading actors in its upstream segment, accounting for roughly 10% of Nigeria’s crude production. Seemingly, the timing is quite inopportune for a large-scale feud – projects are getting delayed and drilling contracts cancelled, Nigeria’s GDP dropped 2% in 2020 just as was bouncing off its period of economic lassitude and OPEC+ production curtailments limiting the potential output of Nigerian producers. Despite the odds, the conflict between Nigeria and Royal Dutch Shell might be a harbinger of great transformations, not necessarily to the benefit of either side. read more

Which Banks Are The Biggest Backers Of Oil And Gas?

By Alex Kimani – Feb 25, 2021, 4:00 PM CST

About a month ago, BlackRock Inc.(NYSE:BLK), the world’s largest asset manager with $9 trillion in assets under management (AUM), sent shockwaves through the fossil fuel sector after it vowed to double down on climate activism by backing more shareholder resolutions on climate change and social issues in 2021.

Around the same time, the $226 billion New York State pension fund and the $5B Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced plans to divest the majority of their fossil fuel investments and also sell shares of other companies that have been actively contributing to global warming. read more

Shell’s 2020 Write Downs Could Soar To $22 Billion

By Charles Kennedy – Dec 21, 2020, 3:30 PM CST

Shell warned the market on Monday that it would book up to $4.5 billion more in post-tax charges in the fourth quarter, which would take the supermajor’s combined write-downs to over $22 billion in the year in which Big Oil significantly cut the value of their oil and gas assets.

Shell expects post-tax charges of between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion in relation to impairments, asset restructuring, and onerous contracts in the fourth quarter, the company said in its Q4 2020 update note today. The charges will include partial impairment of the Appomattox asset in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico due to subsurface updates, charges in the oil products division, including such related to the announced transformation of the refinery portfolio, as well as charges from onerous contracts in the Integrated Gas division. read more