Nigerian Minister of State for Petroleum Edmund Daukoru, visiting Algiers, said he expected Royal Dutch Shell to resume production at its abandoned EA oil field in the southern Niger Delta imminently. The company has not confirmed this. A Shell spokeswoman in London said, "We will return to the areas when it is safe to do so, and there's nothing known in terms of timing."   more »

Royal Dutch Shell has one word to offer on the subject of its musical oil barrels. "What?" said Shell spokeswoman Alexandra Wright in London. But the World Cup is about to change Shell's tune.   more »

Publicly, the group has called for the release of ethnic Ijaw leaders from jail and demanded $1.5 billion in restitution from Royal Dutch Shell for years of environmental damage to the area. In February, a Nigerian court also ordered Shell, along with other oil companies, to pay up. Shell is appealing.   more »

Nigerian militants who have been holding nine foreign oil workers for the past 11 days want a guarantee there will be no military reprisal against them before they release the hostages, Delta state Gov. James Ibori said Tuesday.   more »

"I see it as a quasi-permanent state of civil strife," he said. "If there are ... more abductions of personnel, one could reach a situation where the oil companies will have to pull out their men, but I don't know if we've reached that yet."   more »

WARRI, Nigeria — Militants launched a wave of attacks across Nigeria's oil-rich southern delta Saturday, blowing up oil installations and seizing nine foreign oil workers, including three Americans, officials said. A Royal Dutch Shell official said the company was forced to shut down a facility that moves 400,000 barrels of oil a day _ 16 percent of the West Africa nation's output.   more »

The group claims to be fighting for local control of oil wealth by inhabitants of the impoverished delta, who accuse joint ventures operated by the Nigerian state and Western oil companies of cheating them out of the wealth pumped from their backyards.

Hundreds of flares burn at any one time. Lit from the natural gas that comes to the surface with extracted oil, the flares spew carbon dioxide and potentially carcinogenic particles.   more »

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Britain's government should lower taxes on domestic oil producers if oil prices fall, in order to increase investment in North Sea drilling projects, Royal Dutch Shell PLC's chief executive said Monday. Van der Veer was speaking at an energy conference alongside Britain's Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks.   more »

The lawsuit "is just a blatant abrogation by Shell on the agreement that they made," he said. "I don't object to a company making money. But I think they are acting in bad faith on this."   more »

A county official assailed Shell Oil Co. today for its lawsuit to avoid paying $2 million annually in county taxes on its local inventory.   more »

Shell had armed naval personnel in the field who weren't all that courageous when challenged" by the militants, Dick said.    more »

Exxon Mobil took out full-page advertisements in several major newspapers on Monday, including the Houston Chronicle, New York Times and Washington Post, in an effort to defend profits and anticipate consumer questions   more »

The militants are demanding the release of two imprisoned figureheads of their ethnic Ijaw group and have threatened more attacks on oil facilities.   more »

Thursday 5 January 2006

By BRAD FOSS AP Business Writer
© 2006 The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Federal commodity-trading regulators on Wednesday announced that a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell PLC has agreed to pay a $200,000 penalty to settle charges of making "fictitious" trades of crude oil futures contracts.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Shell International Trading and Shipping Co. of London engaged in prearranged "non-competitive" trades on the New York Mercantile Exchange with a U.S.-based Shell subsidiary, Shell Trading US Co., on five occasions between November 2003 and March 2004.

"In each instance, the traders prearranged the trade by agreeing on the quantity and the settlement month, and agreeing to take the opposite positions of the trade. There was no prearrangement as to price," the CFTC said in an order detailing the case against Shell.

The head trader at Shell Trading, Nigel Catterall of Sugarland, Texas, will pay an additional $100,000 to settle the charges. Catterall was involved in three of the five instances of alleged abuses, the CFTC said.

A spokeswoman for Shell said the company did not immediately have any response. As part of its agreement to pay the fines, Shell neither admitted nor denied the CFTC's findings.