Shell – praag.org

Major oil companies withdrawing from Southern Africa

BP is no longer trading in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana or Malawi.

In some of these countries had a BP presence for almost a century. Were all these BP associate companies suddenly unprofitable or was something deeper at work?

The sub-Saharan oil industry has registered the withdrawal from the region of major oil companies.

A clue could be the recent spat between Chevron and a new oil industry entrant in Cape Town in the shape of a black economic empowerment company called Burgan. Chevron claims it threatens the viability of their refinery with its ability to import, store and sell motor fuels.

Chevron’s complaints go further. Probably speaking for the other South African crude oil refiners, it points bitterly to the refusal or delay, by the government, to allow a “cost recovery mechanism” to make it worthwhile to upgrade local refineries to produce the higher quality fuels demanded by motor manufacturers.

Chevron argues that our regulated oil industry is a strategic asset with sacred status. It believes nothing should be changed without industry approval.

A more powerful reason for a reluctance to invest in new plant without a sweetener from the Treasury may be found in what has been happening in Saudi Arabia and India. In both countries there are now new and massive crude oil refineries producing, and selling to all comers, large volumes of motor fuels and other petroleum products.

The nearest customers for production surpluses of these huge refineries are in Africa, particularly those on its eastern seaboard – South Africa being the biggest.

The economies of scale is deadly. Saudi Arabia can undercut any refinery far from crude oil sources – such as those in Durban, Cape Town, and Gauteng. It can also produce the new higher quality fuel. Local refineries cannot do so.

South Africa’s crude oil refining capacity is 553 000 barrels a day. Saudi Arabia production is huge by comparison. Estimates are 3 million barrels a day and upwards. Some analysts (The Wall Street Journal) expect Saudi Arabian refining capacity to rise to 8 million barrels a day within a decade. Others predict 12 million barrels a day within 10 years.

Not only Saudi refineries pose a severe threat to our local ones. There are large ones in India too. In particularly the one recently completed by Reliance. It alone can produce more that all six of our refineries (including Sasol) combined. It has a reported capacity of 1.2 million barrels a day. It is the world’s largest.

Source: IOL

Shell sails off with vessel named after Nazi

Royal Dutch Shell’s decision to plough ahead with plans to host a ship named after a Nazi in UK waters has provoked outrage among Jewish communities and Holocaust memorial groups.

The vessel is named after Pieter Schelte Heerema, a Nazi who was a member of the Waffen-SS during WWII.

Having failed in its efforts to get the vessel’s owner to change the name of the ship, Shell is set to launch the boat in UK waters in coming weeks.

The move forms part of the energy giant’s broader agenda of decommissioning an oilfield off the coast of Scotland.

As part of this process, Shell has tendered plans to the British government to use the “Peter Schelte” vessel to remove the Brent Delta oil platform from the East Shetland basin.

The oil rig, which consists of a 23,500 ton steel framework, will then be dispatched for scrapping.

The “Peter Schelte” ship is currently docked in Rotterdam, where its construction is almost complete. Edward Heerema, the son of Pieter Schelte Heerema, named it in memory of his father.

The vessel’s planned presence in British waters has sparked anger among Jewish groups throughout Europe.

Vivian Wineman, chief of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said he will challenge Shell’s plan to introduce the ship to North Sea waters.

“We call on Shell and the government to insist the ship is renamed,” he told the Financial Times.

“The ship-owner should be sensitive to the citizens of Britain and the Netherlands, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who will be deeply hurt.”

“There is never a good time to name a ship after a dead Nazi, but coming just as we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and considering the majority of Dutch Jews were killed in the Holocaust, this is very unfortunate timing.”

Shell said it had backed a campaign, spearheaded by the Dutch, to have the name of the ship altered. Its owner, the chief of Swiss-based energy firm Allseas, however, refused the demand.

“Shell believes that the name of the vessel is inappropriate. We have raised our concerns with Allseas and asked them to consider changing the name,” the firm told the FT.

“However, the name of the vessel is a matter for Allseas alone, and one for Allseas to justify,” it added.

The issue has reportedly been considered by Shell’s top management. But the crane ship is the only one in the world capable of lifting the energy firm’s mammoth Brent oil platform.

The Brent oil field, at the center of the controversy, has yielded 2 billion barrels of oil and almost 6 trillion cubic feet of gas since production began in 1976.

Esther Voet, chief of the Dutch Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel (Cidi), which fronted the ship’s renaming campaign, denounced Shell for deciding to use the vessel.

“This is a bloodstain on the name of Royal Dutch Shell,” she told the FT.

The British government told the newspaper the issue of the ship’s name was “a matter for Allseas and Shell to resolve.”

Pieter Schelte Heerema lived in Venezuela prior to the war, and made his way back join the Nazis after Germany invaded the Netherlands.

After his conviction, a judge found that he had severed ties with the Nazis and worked for the Resistance. Although Heerema’s testimony has been discredited by some, the judge believed his testimony and halved his sentence.

The former Nazi soldier later founded a successful oil services firm in the Netherlands called Heerema.

Shell pushes SA for shale

Royal Dutch Shell pushed SA on Wednesday to decide on its application, now nearly four years old, to explore for shale gas in the Karoo, a pristine semi-desert that may contain some of the world’s largest reserves.

Shell’s application in early 2011 for an exploration licence in the Karoo, which the US Energy Information Administration says may hold up to 390-trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable reserves, caused an uproar from farmers and green groups, and an 18-month moratorium on the issuing of permits.

A year ago, several ministers — including then-mining minister Susan Shabangu — suggested hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, exploration licences were about to be issued but none has been forthcoming.

The mining ministry has failed to clarify reasons for the delay, either to Reuters or Shell.

“Why it is taking so long is a conundrum that we are trying to figure out,” Shell SA chairman Bonang Mohale told a news conference.

“We were hoping that by now we would have at least started the exploration process.”

With energy firms chasing large natural gas finds in places such as Mozambique, Brazil and China, SA could ill-afford to carry on delaying much longer, he added.

“Capital is moving,” he said. “My guess is that we are probably months away, not years away, from the issuing of exploration rights.”

The US estimates give SA the world’s eighth-biggest shale reserves, with nearly two-thirds the deposits estimated in the US.

Shell says it is committed to investing $200m in gas exploration in the area, which lies at the underdeveloped heart of Africa’s most advanced economy.

A Shell-commissioned study by Cape Town-based consultancy Econometrix suggests extracting 50-trillion cubic feet of gas would add $20bn, or 0.5%, of gross domestic product annually for 25 years to an economy that has always been a major energy importer.

The study also suggests it would create 700,000 jobs, a major draw for a government trying and failing to come up with answers to persistent 25% unemployment.

Opponents of shale gas fracking say the government has failed to introduce a suitably robust regulatory framework to prevent damage to the delicate environment, ecosystems and water supplies of the Karoo.

The spokeswoman for the mining ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Source: Reuters

Fracking could cause cancer

Shale gas exploration, currently planned in the Karoo, won’t only negatively affect the environment and water resources in that region, but could pose significant health risks to surrounding communities, a Cape Town academic has warned.

These include cancer and the risk of tuberculosis.

Professor Bob Mash, head of family medicine at Stellenbosch University, said while fracking might reduce carbon emissions associated with the use of coal and had substantial economic benefits for the country, the drilling and fracking processes – which released hundreds of harmful chemicals, including silica – not only posed health risks to workers, but to other people as far as 200km away.

South Africa is about to embark on exploratory high-volume hydraulic fracturing to extract huge reserves of natural gas contained in the shale rock.

The government is expected to publish final regulations for hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as fracking, this month, but President Jacob Zuma has already labelled the development of shale as a “game-changer” for South Africa’s economy.

Writing in the SA Medical Journal, Mash said exposure of workers to silica over long periods not only resulted in lung diseases such as silicosis and TB, but use of potential carcinogens during fracking, such as benzene, cadmium, ethylbenzene, formaldehyde, nickel sulphate and boric acid, could result in the development of various cancers.

Cadmium was linked to lung cancer as well as kidney, breast and prostate cancer while ethylbenzene was a possible carcinogen with links to kidney damage. Formaldehyde was linked to leukaemia and brain tumours.

Mash said no comprehensive health assessments had been done as part of the decision-making up to now, prompting him to call for a precautionary approach to fracking in South Africa.

Exploratory fracking was expected to cover an area of about 200 000km2, including the Karoo, parts of the Free State, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape and portions of KwaZulu-Natal.

“The voice of the health profession should be part of the debate, and a full health assessment is required before companies are given the go-ahead to drill,” Mash said.

Source: IOL

Did Mandela’s friend supply chemical weapons to Syrian rebels?

Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Nelson Mandela

by Terry Crawford-Browne

REPORTS from Syria by Jordanian journalists allege that it was Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia who distributed those chemical weapons to the Syrian rebels.( Here he is shown with that other unrepentant terrorist)

If true, it indicates the chemical attack in Damascus to have been a false-flag operation by the American war business.

This would be entirely in keeping with Prince Bandar’s history of organising the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, the Iran-Contra weapons exchanges, Libya in 2011, the suppression of the Shia uprising in Bahrain, Saudi support for the coup d’etat in Egypt and support for Syrian rebels.

Other reports confirm that Prince Bandar also went to see Russian President Vladimir Putin last month and offered to buy $15bn worth of Russian weapons provided Mr Putin abandoned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Mr Putin gave him short shrift.

Prince Bandar was not only the Saudi ambassador in Washington for 22 years and friends of Ronald Reagan and the Bush family, but he also negotiated the 1985 £43bn Al-Yamamah weapons deal with Margaret Thatcher, which Tony Blair renewed in 2007 with the Al-Salaam weapons deal.

When the British Serious Fraud Office investigated the bribes which BAE Systems paid him, Prince Bandar allegedly threatened blood in the streets of London.

Mr Blair squelched the investigation citing “national security.” The Guardian newspaper revealed a couple of months later how BAE with collusion of the British government had laundered bribes to Prince Bandar of over £1bn through Riggs Bank in Washington DC and other US banks.

Most importantly, Prince Bandar and Ms Thatcher negotiated the Al-Yamamah deal under the British Official Secrets Act, meaning that it cannot be investigated in Britain.

Saudi Arabia ships thousands of barrels per day of oil consigned to the Bank of England, which is then distributed to Shell and BP.

Over the years a surplus has developed, which is guesstimated to be worth over $150bn. Its purpose is a) to guarantee British and US support for the Saudi royal family against domestic insurrection and b) to fund covert destabilisation of resource-rich countries in Asia and Africa under the guise of the war on terror.

Having targeted Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and other countries over the years, Syria and Egypt are Prince Bandar’s current targets. When will SA be targeted by the American and British “war business” given our country’s mineral wealth?

Saudi Arabia made lavish donations to the African National Congress. Prince Bandar was also the only foreigner present at Nelson Mandela’s secret wedding to Graca Machel, and was a frequent visitor to SA when the arms deal was being negotiated.