Shell Nearly Sold Its Norwegian Oil And Gas Assets In Late 2022

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Jan 10, 2023

Shell held talks last year with the biggest UK North Sea producer Harbour Energy to sell its oil and gas fields offshore Norway and some mature assets offshore the UK, but a deal ultimately couldn’t be reached due to price volatility, company sources told Reuters on Tuesday. 

Shell, as well as other majors, have worked in recent years on streamlining asset portfolios to focus on the most profitable projects. Back in 2021, Shell said that its oil production peaked in 2019 and is set for a continual decline over the next three decades as it looks toward the renewables side of the business. Shell said its carbon dioxide emissions also likely peaked—a year earlier, in 2018.  

The UK-based supermajor and Harbour Energy were in the advanced stages of talks for the sale at the end of 2022, according to Reuters’ sources.

Just then, Norway had ramped up its natural gas production and become the single largest gas supplier to Europe’s biggest economy, Germany. Yesterday, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate said that Norway would continue to pump the current high volumes of natural gas for at least another five years as operators have pledged $30.3 billion (300 billion Norwegian crowns) to develop new fields and extend the lifetimes of producing fields.  

Shell, which has been present in Norway since 1912, would have been the latest supermajor to quit the region. U.S. majors Chevron and ExxonMobil exited operations on the Norwegian Continental Shelf in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

Now Wael Sawan, Shell’s new CEO who succeeded Ben van Beurden on January 1, is not currently reviewing the Norwegian assets, according to two Reuters’ sources. 

Apart from oil and gas assets, Shell’s business in Norway includes participation in the Northern Lights carbon capture and storage (CCS) project together with Norway’s Equinor and France’s TotalEnergies. Northern Lights is Norway’s first license for CO2 storage on the Shelf. 

Philippines Supreme Court Voids Major International Oil And Gas Deal

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Jan 10, 2023

A 2005 deal for oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea signed by the Philippines with companies from China and Vietnam is illegal, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, saying the country’s constitution bars foreign firms from exploring Philippine natural resources.

The ruling, 14 years after an appeal was lodged, could make talks between China and the Philippines on energy exploration in non-disputed parts of the South China Sea more complicated, according to Reuters.

The long-running dispute in the South China Sea involves territorial claims by China as well as Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei, and Malaysia. China has territorial claims to about 90 percent of the South China Sea, which has put it at odds with its neighbors.

A court in The Hague in 2016 ruled against China’s claims and in favor of the Philippines. China, however, has not acknowledged the ruling, which has heightened tensions in the area. Instead, it has continued with its agenda, according to which most of the sea is Chinese waters. 

China and the Philippines agreed at the end of 2019 to pursue joint oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea.

The South China Sea may hold 28 billion barrels of oil, according to an estimate from the U.S. Geological Survey from the mid-90s. Since then, with improvements in technology, this figure could have increased substantially.

However, in June 2022, the Philippines ditched talks with China on a potential joint exploration for oil and gas in the South China Sea due to sovereignty issues and constraints in the Philippines’ constitution.

Because of the Chinese claims over most of the South China Sea, the Philippines has struggled to find partners willing to engage in the exploration of resources in the basin.

Iraq’s First New Refinery In Decades Set To Hit Full Capacity By July

By Charles Kennedy - Jan 10, 2023

The new Karbala refinery south of Baghdad is expected to reach full 140,000 barrels per day (bpd) capacity by July this year, a source at the facility told Reuters on Tuesday.

The Karbala refinery, estimated to have cost just over $6 billion, is expected to begin commercial production of fuels in the middle of March, Iraqi Oil Minister Hayan Abdel Ghani said this weekend.  

The start of production will see the refinery doing test runs at 60% of capacity, according to the source who spoke to Reuters.

Karbala, Iraq’s first new refinery in decades, is designed to produce gasoline, LPG, jet fuel, gasoil, fuel oil, and asphalt. According to Argus, the fuels from the facility will help Iraq cut its refined product imports by an estimated 60%.

The new refinery is not expected to affect Iraq’s crude oil exports as OPEC’s second-biggest producer could either raise its oil production or cut processing rates at other refineries, the source told Reuters.  

Iraq’s exports from the southern port of Basra averaged 3.24 million bpd in December, per data from state-owned marketer SOMO seen by Reuters.

Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer behind Saudi Arabia, raked in more than $115 billion in oil revenues in 2023, according to figures released by the country’s oil ministry last week. That figure stems from crude oil exports of 1.209 billion barrels last year—or an average of 3.320 million bpd.

As OPEC’s second-largest crude oil producer, producing 4.5 million bpd in Q3, Iraq relies on oil revenues for nearly all of its export income.

Iraq’s oil revenues fell in 2020 to just $42 billion, according to Al-Monitor, as Saudi Arabia and Russia’s oil price war collided with the start of the pandemic, tanking crude oil prices. In 2021, Iraq’s oil revenues rebounded to $75.6 billion.

Iraq is home to the world’s fifth-largest proven oil reserves, holding 145 billion barrels.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Robbers pull off multimillion-dollar copper heist in Chilean port

Reuters | January 12, 2023 |

Panorama of the port of San Antonio. (Image: Patricio Mecklenburg (Metronick) | Wikimedia Commons.)

Chilean authorities said on Wednesday they were investigating a violent heist in Chile’s main seaport where thieves stole several shipping containers filled with copper belonging to state-owned giant Codelco.


Juan Carlos Catalan, the local prosecutor, said in a statement that ten armed men entered the San Antonio port early on Tuesday morning, attacked workers and stole 13 containers, 12 of which had copper.

“There was one guard and four workers that (the assailants)tied up and beat and left locked up,” Catalan said, adding that workers alerted authorities after they freed themselves.

Catalan said authorities are investigating and reviewing security footage but have not detained any suspects.

In a statement to Reuters, Codelco said the copper was scheduled to be exported and was insured. Citing police sources, local media reported the copper plates were worth an estimated $4.4 million.

The heist is the largest copper theft since a spate of gangster heists in northern Chile last October forced the government to tighten security on trains carrying copper cathodes.

The violent robbery adds pressure over shipment security in the world’s largest copper producer. Mining companies in Chile have repeatedly complained about copper thefts by specialized gangs.

Authorities blamed the train heists on international crime groups while police said Wednesday’s heist could be a local group.

“It is a gang that may be working in San Antonio because we have other crimes with similar characteristics,” local police captain Gonzalo Garcia told Radio Cooperativa, adding that it was a well-planned heist that involved multiple trucks.

“They cut off the security cameras and once the cameras were cut off, the other part of the gang went in to intimidate the guards and the workers.”

(By Natalia Ramos and Alexander Villegas; Editing by Leslie Adler and Josie Kao)

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Indian gold refiners struggle as smugglers offer hefty discounts

Reuters | January 11, 2023 |

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Indian gold refiners have nearly stopped imports of gold dore, a semi-pure alloy, as grey market operators offer hefty discounts to market rates and cut into their slender margins, making business a losing proposition, industry officials say.


Most refiners in the world’s second-biggest consumer of the precious metal have suspended operations and are struggling to honour long-term supply contracts with miners, they said.

“For the last two months Indian prices have been trading at a big discount,” Harshad Ajmera, secretary of the Association of Gold Refiners and Mints (AGRM), told Reuters.

“Refiners can’t offer big discounts as they run operations with wafer-thin margins.”

India’s tax on gold dore is 0.65% lower than the rate on refined gold, so as to make domestic refining viable. But discounts over official prices in the last few weeks have widened to nearly 2% or about $30 per ounce.

Jewellers and bullion dealers were not buying from refiners as they could not offer the same kind of discount available from competing suppliers, he said.

“Our margin is less than 0.5%. How can we match the 2% discount?” asked Ajmera.

Grey market operators, or businesses that smuggle gold from overseas and sell it for cash to avoid the duties, got a boost in July 2022 when India raised its import tax on gold.

Such operators can sell gold at discounts to market prices as they evade the tax of 18.45% on gold, dealers said.

Many Indian refiners are diverting gold dore into refineries in Dubai as they could not sell refined bars at home because of the discounts, said James Jose, managing director of refiner CGR Metalloys.

India relies on imports to meet most of its demand.

The margins of grey market operators are increasing with rising prices, making smuggling even more lucrative, a scenario that can be dispelled only by cutting the import duty on gold to 5%, Jose said.

The AGRM and other trade bodies have asked New Delhi to cut import taxes.

“The government should also increase the import duty difference between refined gold and dore to 1.65%, to make refining viable,” Ajmera said.

India imports gold dore mainly from Ghana and Peru, while refined gold comes from Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

Gold demand usually picks up during the wedding season as the bullion is an essential part of the bride’s dowry in India and also a popular gift from family and guests at weddings.

But this year demand is muted as prices have jumped near a record peak, further eroding refiners’ sales, said Ashok Jain, proprietor of Mumbai-based gold wholesaler Chenaji Narsinghji.

(By Rajendra Jadhav; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

New copper-based coating allows protective gear to detect toxic gases

Staff Writer | January 11, 2023 

Copper imprinted on fabric (left) is replaced with a metal-organic framework (right) capable of detecting and capturing toxic gases. (Image by Dartmouth College).

Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed a durable copper-based coating that can be precisely integrated into fabric to create responsive and reusable materials such as protective equipment, environmental sensors, and smart filters.


The solution can be a game-changer when it comes to the safety of workers in extractive and other industries because it responds to the presence of toxic gases in the air by converting them into less toxic substances that become trapped in the fabric.

In a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the scientists explain that their recent findings build on a conductive metal-organic technology, or framework, they started working on back in 2017. The framework was a simple coating that could be layered onto cotton and polyester to create smart fabrics the researchers named SOFT—Self-Organized Framework on Textiles.

At the time, they were able to demonstrate that SOFT smart fabrics could detect and capture toxic substances i­n the surrounding environment.

For the newest study, the researchers found that—instead of the simple coating reported in 2017—they can precisely embed the framework into fabrics using a copper precursor that allows them to create specific patterns and more effectively fill in the tiny gaps and holes between threads.

The group noted that the framework technology effectively converted the toxin nitric oxide into nitrite and nitrate, and transformed the poisonous, flammable gas hydrogen sulphide into copper sulphide. They also reported that the framework’s ability to capture and convert toxic materials withstood wear and tear, as well as standard washing.

“This new method of deposition means that the electronic textiles could potentially interface with a broader range of systems because they’re so robust,” the study’s corresponding author Katherine Mirica said in a media statement. “This technological advance paves the way for other applications of the framework’s combined filtration and sensing abilities that could be valuable in biomedical settings and environmental remediation.”

The technique could also be a low-cost alternative to technologies that are cost-prohibitive and limited in where they can be deployed by needing an energy source, or—such as catalytic converters in automobiles—rare metals.

“Here we’re relying on an earth-abundant matter to detoxify toxic chemicals, and we’re doing it without any input of outside energy, so we don’t need high temperature or electric current to achieve that function,” Mirica said.

According to the scientist, future work will focus on developing new multifunctional framework materials and scaling up the process of embedding the metal-organic coatings into fabric.

21ST CENTURY ALCHEMY
Superdeep diamond reveals new info on earth’s geological processes
Staff Writer | January 12, 2023 | 

Superdeep diamonds that originate hundreds of kilometers beneath earth’s surface are like time capsules revealing how they were formed. (Image courtesy of the University of Alberta).

A recent paper published in the journal Nature points to a “superdeep” diamond recovered in Kankan, Guinea, as the messenger of new information on plate tectonics, the geological processes that give rise to mountains, oceans and continents.


One of the inclusions found in the diamond was a very pure example of the mineral olivine, a variety of which is more commonly known as the gemstone peridot. Most olivine found on our planet has some iron in it, so the purity of this olivine speaks to the unique conditions under which it was formed.

The olivine’s purity, as well as some of the other minerals that were inclusions in the precious rock, indicate a far deeper origin than usual for a diamond, between what is called the transition zone and the lower mantle zone—420 kilometres to 660 kilometres beneath earth’s surface. It also shows that the environment between these zones has an extremely variable oxygen content.

“To make this extreme composition [of olivine] and the overall mineral assemblage that we’ve got, the only way of doing that is to have a very deeply subducted oceanic plate or slab that goes down into the mantle, so you’re essentially pushing material from the surface of the earth into the depths of the earth,” Graham Pearson, study co-author and director of the Diamond Exploration and Research Training School at the University of Alberta, said in a media statement.

“You get huge gradients in oxygen activity when you do that, and these big gradients are very conducive to driving extreme variations in the composition of minerals,” he noted.

An understanding of these oxygen gradients helps explain how plate tectonics bring volatile elements back up into the mantle, and can also offer clues to how superdeep diamonds are formed—knowledge that can’t be gained any other way.

“You can see oceanic slabs descending into the earth in seismic images, but you don’t have any idea of the detailed structures they develop, or the mechanisms and chemistry going on in those slabs,” Pearson said. “These diamonds provide a unique trace of that detailed chemical evolution as the slab’s going down.”

As researchers gain more insight into the movement of those slabs into the mantle, called subduction, they can better understand plate tectonics.

“Subduction drives the whole of plate tectonics. If you don’t understand the details of subduction, that limits your understanding of how plate tectonics work,” the scientist said

Superdeep diamonds, which originate from depths of more than 300 kilometres below earth’s surface, are a treasure trove of scientific information because diamonds are uniquely able to preserve information about where they’re formed, including many of the physical and chemical processes that occurred during their formation.

Most other minerals lose much of that information by the time they make their way to the surface but, as Pearson explained, diamonds act almost as time capsules.

“There are many things at the surface of the earth that can only be explained by processes happening at deep depths,” he pointed out. “If you want to explain things you see at the surface—whether it’s economic mineralization, surface uplift or subsidence phenomena related to oil-bearing basins—you need an understanding of the structure, mechanics and properties of the deep earth. Diamond is uniquely able to bolster that understanding.”

Japanese delegation to visit Canada to meet with battery, mining companies

Reuters | January 12, 2023 |

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio on Thursday. Credit: The Canadian government’s Twitter page

Japan will send a delegation to meet with Canadian battery and mining companies early this year, while Canada is planning a trade mission to Japan later in October, the leaders of both countries announced on Thursday after meeting in Ottawa.


As this year’s host of the Group of Seven (G7), Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida came to Canada to meet Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau before continuing onto Washington, where he will sit down with US President Joe Biden on Friday.

“This spring, we’re… looking forward to hosting an important business delegation from Japan,” Trudeau said. “They’re planning to be meeting with Canadian battery and mining companies and potential partners.”

The two leaders hosted a lunch meeting with Canadian business leaders where “they highlighted the growing and exciting business potential between the two countries,” according to a statement from Trudeau’s office.

Canada has been seeking to woo foreign investment the electric vehicle (EV) supply chain, in particular in mining and processing its abundant critical minerals used in EV batteries, especially for countries who want to reduce their dependence on China for those materials.

Earlier in the day, Kishida said that Japan is looking to Canada to “play a major role, as a resource-rich country” on energy.

Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp, through a subsidiary, owns a 15% stake in the LNG Canada joint venture led by Shell, which Trudeau said was the “largest private investment in Canada.” The liquefied natural gas terminal is being built in British Columbia to supply Canadian natural gas to Asia.

The two leaders agreed that “China is a central challenge,” Kishida said during the news conference, and both reiterated their support for the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

To counter China’s influence in the region and increase its own strategic sway, Canada launched an Indo-Pacific strategy in November.

Kishida welcomed Canada’s diplomatic pivot toward Asia and its efforts to deepen ties with a fast-growing Indo-Pacific region of 40 countries accounting for almost C$47 trillion ($35.2 trillion) in economic activity.

“The two leaders discussed their concerns about China’s actions in the region and agreed on the importance of a coordinated approach to security in the Indo-Pacific,” Trudeau’s office said in a statement.

($1 = 1.3360 Canadian dollars)

(By Steve Scherer and Ismail Shakil; Editing by Chris Reese and David Gregorio)

ECOCIDE

Teck fined $1.6 million for acid spill into Columbia River at Trail smelter operations
Jeremy Hainsworth | January 12, 2023 |

Trail Operations is one of the world’s largest fully integrated zinc and lead smelting and refining complexes. (Image courtesy of Teck Resources.)

Vancouver-based Teck Resources was ordered January 10 to pay C$2.2 million ($1.65m) for an acid spill into the Columbia River at the company’s Trail smelter operations.


A Rossland provincial court judge made the order after the company pleaded guilty to two charges laid under the federal Fisheries Act and one charge laid under the provincial Environmental Management Act. The charges resulted from an effluent release in February 2019.

Teck employees reported a spill of low pH effluent to Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECC) and Emergency Management BC.

ECCC enforcement officers investigated and determined the discharge of approximately 2.5 million litres of effluent into the river just north of the US border resulted from numerous operational errors.

The river contains mountain whitefish, rainbow trout, walleye, brook trout, bull trout, cutthroat trout, white sturgeon, sculpin, redside shiner, and other fish species.

An ECCC news release said the company’s failure to exert due diligence contributed to the duration and extent of the spill.

The investigation found the effluent was caused by a leak of an acidic solution from the company’s fertilizer operations in Warfield, BC, just above the Trail metals smelter.

Much of the discharged effluent was below pH 4, which is deleterious, or harmful to fish.

The C$2 million federal fine will be directed to the Government of Canada’s Environmental Damages Fund.

The remaining C$200,000 is a provincial fine for Teck under the Environmental Management Act for failing to comply with their permit, which specifies acceptable pH levels for discharges and prohibits acutely lethal effluent discharges.

The company’s name will be added to the Environmental Offenders Registry, which lists information on convictions of corporations registered for offences committed under certain federal environmental laws.

In 2021, the company’s Teck Coal Ltd. subsidiary was fined a record C$60 million for discharges from its East Kootenay coal operations into the Fording River and a pond.

(This article first appeared in Business in Vancouver)

Rio Tinto trials renewable diesel at US operations

Reuters | January 13, 2023 |

Kennecott copper operations in Salt Lake City, Utah. Credit: Rio Tinto

Rio Tinto said on Friday it is conducting trials at its Kennecott copper operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, to determine the suitability of renewable diesel for open pit haulage.


The global miner said the trials come after it completed a renewable diesel trial at its Borax mine in California as it seeks to swap conventional diesel for renewable fuel in haul trucks at its operations in the United States.

(By Muhammed Husain; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)