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Shell Oil announced Thursday that it's abandoning efforts to drill in icy waters off Alaska’s northern coast this year, a decision that prompted Alaska's senators to accuse the Obama administration of blocking access to large domestic supplies. The company’s plans to drill in Arctic waters have long been under attack from environmental groups. The Interior Department, after the BP oil spill, halted the oil giant’s plan to drill in 2010. Now the company – which is awaiting air quality permits and Interior’s permission – is throwing in the towel on 2011 too. The Houston Chronicle reports:

New York - The former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister, says Americans could be paying $5 for a gallon of gasoline by 2012. In an interview with Platt's Energy Week television, Hofmeister predicted gasoline prices will spike as the global demand for oil increases. "I'm predicting actually the worst outcome over the next two years which takes us to 2012 with higher gasoline prices," he said.

Energy giants Total, Shell, Statoil and Eni have pledged to end their investments in Iran. The pledges fall in line with tough new energy and financial measures the U.S. Congress imposed on Iran in June, which came atop U.N. Security Council sanctions imposed earlier the same month to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions.

WASHINGTON - UNDER threat of US sanctions, European oil firms Total, Shell, Statoil and Eni have pledged to stop investing in Iran in what amounts to a 'significant setback' to Teheran, a US official said on Thursday. The pledges fall in line with new energy and financial measures against Iran that US President Barack Obama signed into law in July in the wake of UN Security Council sanctions imposed in June to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions. 'We have received commitments from four international energy firms to terminate their investments and avoid any new activity in Iran's energy sector,' Deputy Secretary...

Link only - Pension Shell Games Threaten Market

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- Shell Oil is ready to drill in the Arctic Ocean this summer and asked a federal appeals court Thursday to rule quickly on a challenge by environmentalists concerned about the risk of a major spill after the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Kathleen Sullivan, an attorney for Shell, said the company has spent at least $3.5 billion on Alaska operations in the past few years as it prepares for exploratory drilling set for July in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. "Shell has waited years to recover its investment," Sullivan told a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S....

President O’Bunga is being allowed to use a sleight-of-hand, and none of his detractors or opponents are calling him on it. I’m not referring to his touting the marvelous benefits of his Health Care reforms while glossing over the real-cash implications. Neither am I referring to the smoke-and-mirrors trash given to the CBO for them to use in determining the years-out financial implications. The president (if indeed he legally holds that office, which, with a British-Kenyan father it is impossible to do) claims, employing Josef Goebbels’ “kernel of truth” propaganda gambit, that the majority of Americans want many of the...

DUBAI (Reuters) - Oil major Royal Dutch Shell has stopped gasoline sales to Iran, oil traders said on Wednesday, the latest addition to a growing list of firms that have halted supplies under threat of future U.S. sanctions. The Anglo-Dutch oil firm will join the likes of BP, Reliance Industries, and independent Swiss trader Glencore, among suppliers that have either stopped fuel sales to Iran or have made a decision not to enter into new trading agreements with the world's fifth largest oil exporter. "Shell has stopped selling gasoline to Iran, we have not seen them there for a while...

Royal Dutch Shell Plc said Wednesday it has stopped selling gasoline to Iran, the latest company to cease business with a country that is increasingly targeted by US-encouraged sanctions. "We do not currently sell any gasoline to Iran," said Rayiner Winzenried, a Shell spokesman in The Hague. He declined to say when the sales to Tehran were halted or to relate the move to the call for tighter sanctions. (AP)

Shell Sees No 'Quick Recovery' As Energy Company Cuts 5,000 JobsRoyal Dutch Shell is “not expecting a quick recovery” after shedding 5,000 jobs in a global restructuring and seeing profits drop 73pc on lower oil and gas prices. By Rowena Mason Published: 7:59AM GMT 29 Oct 2009 Europe’s biggest energy company made $2.99bn in profits on a cost of supplies basis – a measure that strips out the effect of changing inventories – slightly beating analyst expectations. Revenue fell 43pc to $76bn. Peter Voser, the chief executive who took over in July, said 5pc of the oil giant’s staff would...

What a difference a year makes. In 2008, we were treated night after night to video clips of the obscene spectacle of Congresspersons berating oil company executives because Big Oil was making a profit. There was talk of Excess Profits Taxes, and endless posturing punctuated with faux indignity. Okay, fast forward to now, and try to pick out the phony headline . . .

The global-warming debate is shifting from science to economics. For years, the fight over the Earth's rising temperature has been mostly over what's causing it: fossil-fuel emissions or natural factors beyond man's control. Now, some of the country's biggest industrial companies are acknowledging that fossil fuels are a major culprit whose emissions should be cut significantly over time. A growing number of these companies are pushing for a mandatory emissions limit, or "cap." Some see a lucrative new market in clean-energy technologies. Many figure a regulation is politically inevitable and they want to be in the room when it's negotiated,...

Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is shifting into high gear. Reporters and commentators follow his every move and bombard the public with notice of his activities and opinions. But while the mainstream media promote his ideas about the state of planet Earth, they are mostly silent about the dramatic impact his economic proposals would have on America. And journalists routinely ignore evidence that he may personally benefit from his programs. Would the romance fizzle if Gore’s followers realized how much their man stands to gain? Earlier this year Gore experienced a notable public relations debacle. The Tennessee Center for...

The trial of Anglo-Dutch super major, Shell, over its alleged complicity in the death of Mr. Ken Saro-Wiwa, leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), will begin today. Lawyers from the company will today represent the oil major in a New York court as it faces charges that it colluded in human rights abuses and torture in the Niger Delta which led to the hanging in 1995 of Ogoni campaigner and renowned poet, Saro-Wiwa. The troubled oil giant had refused to comment on the court case ahead of the hearings, but the continued flaring of...

The world's largest natural gas company, Russia's Gazprom, has after years of attempts finally gotten a foothold in the U.S., the world's biggest gas market. A supply agreement, part of a multipart contract reached with Royal Dutch Shell, was announced late Wednesday. The contract, signed in Moscow by Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller and his Shell counterpart Jeroen Van der Veer, guarantees the two companies will deliver 1 million tons of Russian liquefied natural gas annually until 2028. Under the arrangement, Gazprom gets access to a Shell terminal in Baja California, Mexico, that will turn Russian liquefied gas into gas that...

Shell will no longer invest in renewable technologies such as wind, solar and hydro power because they are not economic, the Anglo-Dutch oil company said today. It plans to invest more in biofuels which environmental groups blame for driving up food prices and deforestation. Executives at its annual strategy presentation said Shell, already the world's largest buyer and blender of crop-based biofuels, would also invest an unspecified amount in developing a new generat­ion of biofuels which do not use food-based crops and are less harmful to the environment. The company said it would concentrate on developing other cleaner ways of...

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe's largest oil company, is examining possible oilfield projects in Iraq as the nation prepares to issue exploration permits next year, Chief Executive Officer Jeroen van der Veer said today. Shell may bid for Iraqi fields in the first half of 2009, van der Veer told reporters at a conference in London. Iraq expects to award contracts by June in its first oil-licensing round since the U.S. invasion in 2003, Oil Minister Hussain al- Shahristani said last month. "They've just issued the rules on how to bid,'' van der Veer said. "It's quite complicated; we will...

Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell says Shell Oil Products U.S. has agreed to take steps to reduce cigarette sales to minors at 13,000 gas stations, including 76 in Vermont.

Click here for video. This terrifying slow motion video shows the destructive power of a tank canister shot, blazing across an entire battlefield. It's so spectacularly crystal-clear that you can easily understand why it is one of the most feared weapons by infantry soldiers. The canister shot is not new, however. This simple and incredibly effective technology has been wreaking havoc in ground fronts since the Napoleonic Wars. Designed to create a destructive cloud to do major damage on a large group of soft bodies, the canister shot has played a central role in ground battles since the 18th century....

Nigeria: The main armed group claims to have destroyed a Shell pipeline LAGOS - The main armed group in southern Nigeria, Mend said they had destroyed Thursday evening a "significant pipeline" and belonging to Anglo-Dutch company Shell. At 17:30 GMT, "fighters of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta have destroyed with powerful explosives, a major oil pipeline belonging to Shell Development Company," in Rivers State in southern Nigeria's oil, said a press release the group.