SHELL OIL COMPANY

'Shell Oil Company' is the United States-based affiliate of Royal Dutch Shell, a multinational oil company ("oil major") of Anglo Dutch origins, which is amongst the largest private sector energy corporations in the world. Approximately 22,000 Shell employees are based in the U.S. The company's head office is in Houston, Texas. Shell Oil Company, including its consolidated companies and its share in equity companies, is one of America’s leading oil and natural gas producers, natural gas marketers, gasoline marketers and petrochemical manufacturers.

Contents

Independence

Business areas

Subsidiaries

References

External links

Independence

Until the mid 1980s Shell’s business in the United States 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 London and The Hague, in the running of the American business. In 1984 Shell made a bid to purchase those shares of Shell Oil Company it did not own (around 30%) and despite some opposition from some minority shareholders which led to a court case Shell succeeded in the buy out for a sum of $5.7billion.
Despite the acquisition, however, Shell Oil remained a very independent business. This was partly for complex legal reasons as RoyalDutch/Shell feared that there could be onerous liability problems if a closer control of Shell Oil's affairs was taken by the "parent companies". One of the stranger consequences of this independence was that the Shell logo used in the US was slightly differerent from that used in the rest of the world. In the 1990s Shell Oil's independence began gradually to be eroded as the "parent companies" took a more hands-on approach in the running of the business. The logo now used in the United States is the same as that used elsewhere.

Business areas

Shell is the market leader for the supply of gasoline to the motorist through approximately 25,000 Shell-branded gas stations in the US which also serve as Shell's most visible public presence. Shell Oil Company is a 50/50 partner with the Saudi Arabian government-owned oil company Saudi Aramco in Motiva Enterprises, a refining and marketing joint venture which owns and operates three oil refineries on the Mexican Gulf coast of the United States. It also holds 80% of an exploration firm called Pecten that explores and drills in various offshore locations including the oil basin near Douala, Cameroon in cooperation with the French government-owned Elf Aquitaine. ^[1]

Subsidiaries

★ Aera Energy LLC is a joint venture with Mobil Oil operating in California.

★ Shell Development Emeryville was a research facility that operated from 1928-1966 in California

References

1. http://www.mbendi.co.za/orgs/ce88.htm

External links

★ Shell in the United States website

★ Royal Dutch Shell website

★ Motiva website

★ Saudi Aramco website

★ Shell Invests in Hydrogen from Biomass Production