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Royal Dutch Shell plc (LSE: RDSA, RDSB), commonly known as Shell, is a global oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom.[2] It is the fifth-largest company in the world (and the second-largest energy company) according to a composite measure by Forbes magazine and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors".[3][4] It is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading. It also has major renewable energy activities, including in biofuels, hydrogen, solar and wind power.
Shell has operations in over 90 countries, produces around 3.1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day and has 44,000 service stations worldwide.[5] Shell Oil Company, its subsidiary in the United States, is one of its largest businesses.[6]
Shell has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It has secondary listings on Euronext Amsterdam and the New York Stock Exchange.
Contents [hide]
1 History
1.1 20th century
1.2 21st century
2 Corporate affairs
2.1 Management
2.2 Name and logo
3 Operations
3.1 Oil and gas related activities
3.1.1 Africa
3.1.2 Australia
3.1.3 Ireland
3.1.4 New Zealand
3.1.5 North America
3.1.6 The Philippines
3.1.7 Scandinavia
3.2 Other activities
4 Controversies
4.1 2004 overstatement of oil reserves
4.2 Canadian oil sands
4.3 Corporate communications
4.4 Environmental pollution
4.5 Health and safety
4.6 Human rights
4.7 Sakhalin-II project
4.8 Tom Corbett campaign donations
4.9 Whistleblowers
5 See also
6 References
7 Bibliography
8 External links
[edit]History
Royal Dutch Petroleum dock in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia)
Headquarters in The Hague
[edit]20th century
The Royal Dutch Shell Group was created in February 1907 when the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (legal name in Dutch, N.V. Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij) and the "Shell" Transport and Trading Company Ltd of the United Kingdom merged their operations[7] – a move largely driven by the need to compete globally with the then dominant American petroleum company, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. The terms of the merger gave 60% ownership of the new Group to the Dutch arm and 40% to the British.
Royal Dutch Petroleum Company was a Dutch company founded in 1890 by Jean Baptiste August Kessler,[7] along with Henri Deterding, when a Royal charter was granted by King William III of the Netherlands to a small oil exploration and production company known as "Royal Dutch Company for the Working of Petroleum Wells in the Dutch Indies".[8]
The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company (the quotation marks were part of the legal name) was a British company, founded in 1897 by Marcus Samuel and his brother Samuel Samuel.[7] Their father had owned a company, importing and selling sea-shells, after which the company "Shell" took its name.[9] In 1925, he became 1st Viscount Bearsted. Lord Bearsted was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Law (LLD) from the University of Sheffield during his lifetime.[9] Initially the Company commissioned eight oil tankers for the purposes of transporting oil. In 1919, Shell took control of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company and in 1921 formed Shell-Mex Limited which marketed products under the "Shell" and "Eagle" brands in the United Kingdom. In 1932, partly in response to the difficult economic conditions of the times, Shell-Mex merged its UK marketing operations with those of British Petroleum to create Shell-Mex and BP Ltd,[10] a company that traded until the brands separated in 1975.
Around 1953, Shell was the first company to purchase and use an electronic computer in the Netherlands.[11] The computer, a Ferranti Mark 1 Star, was assembled and used at the Shell laboratory in Amsterdam. In 1970 Shell acquired the mining company Billiton, which it subsequently sold in 1994 and now forms part of BHP Billiton.[12]
[edit]21st century
In November 2004, following a period of turmoil caused by the revelation that Shell had been overstating its oil reserves, it was announced that the Shell Group would move to a single capital structure, creating a new parent company to be named Royal Dutch Shell plc, with its primary listing on the London Stock Exchange, a secondary listing on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, its headquarters and tax residency in The Hague, Netherlands and its registered office in London. The unification was completed on 20 July 2005. Shares were issued at a 60/40 advantage for the shareholders of Royal Dutch in line with the original ownership of the Shell Group.[13] In December 2009 a consortium led by Shell was awarded a production contract for the Majnoon field in the south of Iraq, which contains an estimated 12.6 billion barrels of oil.[14]
In February 2010 Shell and Cosan formed a 50:50 joint-venture comprising all of Cosan's Brazilian ethanol, energy generation, fuel distribution and sugar activities, and all of Shell's Brazilian retail fuel and aviation distribution businesses.[15] In March 2010, Shell announced the sale of some of its assets, including its liquid petroleum gas (LPG) business, to meet the cost of a planned $28bn capital spending programme. Shell invited buyers to submit indicative bids, due by 22 March, with a plan to raise $2–3bn from the sale.[16] In June 2010, Royal Dutch Shell agreed to acquire all of the business of East Resources for a cash consideration of $4.7 billion. The transaction included East Resources' tight gas fields.[17]
[edit]Corporate affairs
[edit]Management
On 4 August 2005, the board of directors announced the appointment of Jorma Ollila, chairman and CEO of Nokia at the time, to succeed Aad Jacobs as the company’s non-executive chairman on 1 June 2006. Ollila is the first Shell chairman to be neither Dutch nor British. Other non-executive directors include Maarten van den Bergh, Wim Kok, Nina Henderson, Lord Kerr, Adelbert van Roxe, and Christine Morin-Postel.
As of 1 July 2009, Peter Voser is CEO of Shell.[18] Peter, who is Swiss, is the first non-Dutch, non-British CEO of the company.
[edit]Name and logo
A Shell-sponsored Ferrari F60 Formula One motor racing car
The name Shell is linked to The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company.[19] In 1833, the founder's father, also Marcus Samuel, founded an import business to sell seashells to London collectors. When collecting seashell specimens in the Caspian Sea area in 1892, the younger Samuel realized there was potential in exporting lamp oil from the region and commissioned the world's first purpose-built oil tanker, the Murex (Latin for a type of snail shell), to enter this market; by 1907 the company had a fleet. Although for several decades the company had a refinery at Shell Haven on the Thames, there is no evidence of this having provided the name.
The Shell logo is one of the most familiar commercial symbols in the world. This logo is known as the "pecten" after the sea shell Pecten maximus (the giant scallop), on which its design is based. The yellow and red colours used are thought to relate to the colours of the flag of Spain, as Shell built early service stations in California, which was an early Spanish colony.
The slash was removed from the name "Royal Dutch/Shell" in 2004, concurrent with moves to merge the two legally separate companies (Royal Dutch and Shell) to the single legal entity which exists today.[20]
[edit]Operations
The upstream provides two thirds of Shell's revenues
Shell oil depot in Kowloon, Hong Kong
Shell has five core businesses: exploration and production (the "upstream"), gas and power, refining and marketing (the "downstream"), chemicals, and trading and shipping. Shell has operations in over 140 countries.
Shell is a signatory participant of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights.
[edit]Oil and gas related activities
Shell's primary business is the management of a vertically integrated oil company. The development of technical and commercial expertise in all stages of this vertical integration, from the initial search for oil (exploration) through its harvesting (production), transportation, refining and finally trading and marketing established the core competencies on which the company was founded. Similar competencies were required for natural gas, which has become one of the most important businesses in which Shell is involved, and which contributes a significant proportion of the company's profits. While the vertically integrated business model provided significant economies of scale and barriers to entry, each business now seeks to be a self-supporting unit without subsidies from other parts of the company.
Traditionally, Shell was a heavily decentralised business worldwide (especially in the downstream) with companies in over 100 countries, each of which operated with a high degree of independence. The upstream tended to be far more centralised with much of the technical and financial direction coming from the central offices in The Hague. Nevertheless. there were very large "exploration and production" companies in a small number of major oil and gas production centres such as the United Kingdom (Shell Expro, a Joint Venture with Exxon), Nigeria, Brunei, and Oman.
Downstream operations, which now also includes the chemicals business, generates a third of Shell's profits worldwide and is known its global network of more than 40,000 petrol stations and its 47 oil refineries. The downstream business, which in some countries also included oil refining, generally included a retail petrol station network, lubricants manufacture and marketing, industrial fuel and lubricants sales and a host of other product/market sectors such as LPG and bitumen. The practice in Shell was that these businesses were essentially local and that they were best managed by local "operating companies" – often with middle and senior management reinforced by expatriates. In the 1990s, this paradigm began to change, and the independence of operating companies around the world was gradually reduced. Today, virtually all of Shell’s operations in various businesses are much more directly managed from London and The Hague. The autonomy of “operating companies” has been largely removed, as more "global businesses" have been created.
[edit]Africa
Shell began drilling for oil in Africa during the 1950s. Shell began oil production in Nigeria in 1958.[21] Shell operates in the upstream oil sector in Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Gabon where is the giant Rabi-Kounga oil field, Ghana, Libya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa and Tunisia; and in the downstream sector in 16 other countries.[22]
In Nigeria, Shell told US diplomats that it had placed staff in all the main ministries of the government.[23]
In April 2010, Shell announced its intention to divest from downstream business of all African countries except South Africa to Vitol and "Helios".[24] In several countries such as Tunisia, protests and strikes broke out. Shell denied rumors of the sellout.[25] Shell continues however upstream activities/extracting crude oil in the oil-rich Niger Delta as well as downstream/commercial activities in South Africa.
[edit]Australia
Shell petrol station in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales.
Main article: Shell Australia
In Australia, retailer Coles Group (now part of Wesfarmers) purchased the rights to the retail business from the existing Shell Australia multi-site franchisees in 2003 for an amount less than A$100 million. The purchase was made in response to a popular discount fuel offer by rival Woolworths Limited launched some years earlier.
Coles Express' only affiliation with Shell is that Shell is the exclusive supplier of fuel and lubricant products, leases the service station property to Coles, and maintains the presence of the "pecten" and other Shell branding on the price board and other signage. Coles Express sets fuel and shop prices and runs the business, provides convenience and grocery merchandise through its supply chain and distribution network, and directly employs the service station staff.
Royal Dutch Shell is currently developing the first floating liquefied natural gas facility, which will be situated 200 km off the coast of Western Australia and is due for completion in around 2017.[26] When it is finished, it will measure around 488m long and 74m wide, and when fully ballasted will weigh 600,000 tonnes.[27]
[edit]Ireland
Shell first started trading in Ireland in 1902.[28] Shell E&P Ireland (SEPIL) (previously Enterprise Energy Ireland) is an Irish exploration and production subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell. Its headquarters are on Leeson Street in Dublin. It was acquired in May 2002.[29] Its main project is the Corrib gas project, a large gas field off the northwest coast, for which Shell has encountered controversy and protests in relation to the onshore pipeline and licence terms.
In 2005 Shell disposed of its entire retail and commercial fuels business in Ireland to Topaz Energy Group. This included depots, company-owned petrol stations and supply agreements stations throughout the island of Ireland.[30] The retail outlets were re-branded as Topaz in 2008/9.[31]
Service station near Lost Hills, California
[edit]New Zealand
Shell has had a long-time presence in New Zealand, and partly owns the Maui and Kapuni natural gas fields. In 2011 it completed the sale of its petrol retail division to Infratil and the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, which rebranded the stations as Z Energy. Shell still operates in New Zealand via oil exploration and infrastructure.
[edit]North America
Main articles: Shell Oil Company and Shell Canada
Through most of Shell's history, its business in the United States, Shell Oil Company was substantially independent with its stock ("Shell Oil") being traded on the NYSE and with little direct involvement from the group’s central offices in the running of the American business. Such practice also changed in the 1990s when Shell first bought out the shares in Shell Oil that it did not own and then took a more hands-on approach. In Canada, also previously very independent, Shell has completed its purchase of the shares in Shell Canada that it did not own, to apply the new global business model.
[edit]The Philippines
On January 2010, The bureau of customs claimed 7.34 billion pesos worth of unpaid excise taxes against Pilipinas Shell for importing Catalytic cracked gasoline (CCG) and light catalytic cracked gasoline (LCCG) stating that those imports are bound for tariff charges.[32]
Pilipinas Shell denied the claim stating that those imports are raw materials for making their products. The company later emphasized that they are considering to close their local oil refinery if the case continues. Pilipinas Shell informed the public that they will exhaust all necessary steps to meet the demand for fuel.
[edit]Scandinavia
On 27 August 2007, Royal Dutch Shell and Reitan Group, the owner of the 7-Eleven brand in Scandinavia, announced an agreement to re-brand some 269 service stations across Norway, Sweden Finland and Denmark, subject to obtaining regulatory approvals under the different competition laws in each country.[33] On April 2010 Shell announced that the corporation is in process of trying to find a potential buyer for all of its operations in Finland and is doing similar market research concerning Swedish operations.[34][35]
[edit]Other activities
Over the years Shell has occasionally sought to diversify away from its core oil, gas and chemicals businesses. These diversifications have included nuclear power (a short-lived and costly joint venture with Gulf Oil in the USA); coal (Shell Coal was for a time a significant player in mining and marketing); metals (Shell acquired the Dutch metals-mining company Billiton in 1970) and electricity generation (a joint venture with Bechtel called Intergen). None of these ventures were seen as successful and all have now been divested.
In the early 2000s Shell moved into alternative energy and there is now an embryonic "Renewables" business that has made investments in solar power, wind power, hydrogen, and forestry. The forestry business went the way of nuclear, coal, metals and electricity generation, and was disposed of in 2003. In 2006 Shell sold its entire solar business[36] and in 2008, the company withdrew from the London Array which is expected to become the world's largest offshore wind farm.[37]
Shell also is involved in large-scale hydrogen projects. HydrogenForecast.com describes Shell's approach thus far as consisting of "baby steps", but with an underlying message of "extreme optimism".[38]
In September 2010, Shell agreed to a $12 billion joint venture with Brazilian sugarcane producer Cosan to develop sugarcane-based ethanol and power.[39]
