Oil Giant

After 13 years of litigation, Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to settle with plaintiffs who accused the oil giant of complicity in human rights abuses in Nigeria, the most infamous of which was the execution of prominent playwright, author and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. A member of the Ogoni tribe, Saro-Wiwa was a vocal critic of Shell and the brutal military government of Gen. Sani Abacha.

With energy prices high, Big Oil rules atop the Fortune 500, helping to put Texas just a hair behind California as home to the highest-revenue corporations -- 52 firms, compared with the Golden State's 53. The magazine's latest list of mega-enterprises, released Monday, showed Exxon Mobil in the Dallas suburb of Irving edging out Wal-Mart Stores for the top spot, with 2011 revenue of $453 billion, compared with $447 billion at the Arkansas-based...

Judicial investigators in France have turned up millions of dollars in shadowy commissions, kickbacks and other under-the-table schemes in a just-completed, eight-year probe of the oil giant Elf Aquitaine that implicates scores of people, including presidential candidate Charles Pasqua. Suspicions involving Pasqua, a former interior minister, are limited to alleged free air travel. The investigation named 43 people, including top Elf executives, and was one of the most sweeping in modern France.

The British, it seems, are not enamored of British Petroleum, even when it shells out big bucks to support the nation's greatest literary treasure. A group of actors staged their own protest play Monday night before a performance of "The Tempest" at Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, to express their displeasure with a sponsorship deal involving the oil giant. BP is supporting the World Shakespeare Festival, a joint venture between the Royal Shakespeare Co. and the Globe Theatre that is being billed as the biggest Shakespeare festival ever held.

Oil giant BP will give $500 million to a partnership led by UC Berkeley to develop new biofuels and reduce environmental harm caused by the use of fossil fuels, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and company officials announced Thursday. UC Berkeley will team up with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to develop fuel from plants, improve the extraction of oil from existing reserves and find ways to keep carbon from entering the atmosphere.

Only weeks ago, the 16-year legal battle between Chevron Corp. and thousands of indigenous people in Ecuador's Amazon seemed as if it were coming to a close. After years of delay, all that remained was for the judge -- there are no jury trials in Ecuador -- to deliver a verdict on whether the oil company is responsible for wide-scale contamination. But Chevron, which is widely expected to lose and could be assessed a staggering $27 billion in damages, is not going down without some legal pyrotechnics.

In a vast financial restructuring seen as at least partially inspired by takeover fears, Atlantic Richfield announced plans Monday to buy back $4 billion of its stock and cut back its operations sharply nationwide. Among the consequences will be the addition of $4 billion in debt to the Los Angeles-based company's balance sheet, a one-time write-off of $1.3 billion against 1985 earnings and layoffs or early retirement for perhaps thousands of the company's 34,900 employees.

When Chevron was in a New York courtroom battling a lawsuit by thousands of indigenous Ecuadoreans, it argued that the case rightly belonged in their country. But now that the company is poised to lose in the Andean nation and could be assessed as much as $27 billion in damages, it says Ecuador isn't the right place either. Last week, the oil giant shopped the case to yet another court, filing a claim at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Chevron has long maintained that it would appeal an adverse decision, which is entirely understandable.

Helped by supportive comments from the new British prime minister and a rally in the broad stock market, shares of beleaguered oil giant BP surged Thursday to their biggest gain since the crisis over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill erupted in April. BP's stock jumped more than 12% as British Prime Minister David Cameron said he would discuss BP in a scheduled telephone call with President Obama this weekend. Investors interpreted that as an effort by the British government to counter-balance the increasingly vitriolic criticism that Obama and other U.S. lawmakers have leveled at the London company in recent days.

Exxon Corp. gasoline dealers who sued to stop the oil giant from abandoning the Southern California retail market have won a judge's order blocking the exodus until a trial is held. Exxon's domestic oil and gas division said in May that it would stop selling motor fuel at its 156 stations in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties this fall. It was one of a series of cutbacks by the oil company to try to keep costs down. However, in a Friday ruling that was made public Monday, U.S.

Chevron Corp. and Transocean Ltd. are being sued for $22 billion in environmental damages in Brazil, double the initial claims, after a federal prosecutor filed a lawsuit over a second oil spill off the nation's coast. Chevron committed "a series of errors" that led to the March spill at the Frade project, the federal prosecutors' office said. Prosecutor Eduardo Santos de Oliveira is also seeking to halt operations at the project and block the San Ramon, Calif., oil giant from transferring profits from Brazil.

Total SA, Europe's third-largest oil producer, increased its bet on solar energy by buying more of San Jose-based SunPower Corp. and selling its renewable energy development unit to the U.S. company. Total, which already owns 60 percent of the second-largest U.S. solar-panel maker, agreed to pay $163.7 million to raise its stake to 66 percent, SunPower said today in a statement. The solar company will buy Total's Tenesol unit for $165.4 million in cash. Total is buying the SunPower shares at a 50 percent premium over yesterday's closing price, a move that Pavel Molchanov, a Houston-based analyst at Raymond James & Associates Inc., said was a vote of confidence in the company.

Shares of China National Offshore Oil Corp. have taken a hit as the fallout from a pair of June oil spills continues to weigh heavily on the company's performance. By Tuesday's close in Hong Kong, the state-owned oil giant's stock was down more than 10% since the start of the week. The decline comes amid growing criticism about the handling of oil spills in China's northeastern Bohai Sea by CNOOC's partner, ConocoPhillips. The U.S. oil company operated two platforms in an offshore oil field named Penglai 19-3, where an estimated 3,200 barrels of crude oil and drilling fluids were released into the sea in early June.

Exxon Mobil Corp. and Rosneft announced a pact to extract oil and natural gas from the Russian Arctic, the most significant U.S.-Russian corporate deal since President Obama's push to improve ties. The announcement ended any hope that Britain's BP had of reviving its deal with state-owned Rosneft to develop the same Arctic territory. That deal was blocked in May by the billionaire partners in another BP Russian venture. For Exxon, the pact gives the largest U.S. oil company access to substantial reserves in Russia, the world's largest oil producer.

It's easy to get cheesed about high gas prices when oil companies are raking in billions of dollars in profit. Chevron, for one, wants you to know that it's thinking the same. "Oil companies should put their profits to good use," the company declares in recent newspaper ads. And in response to that laudable sentiment, Chevron's chief financial officer, Patricia Yarrington, says, "We agree. " The ads go on to say that "California's economy needs energy to grow. And we're providing it. Reinvesting over $7 billion into the state over the past 5 years.

LAGO AGRIO, Ecuador — Donald Moncayo walks to the edge of a flat grassy field that once held two large pits that brimmed with a stew of water and crude from an oil-drilling operation. He lifts a heavy auger above his head and prepares to plunge it into the ground. "They always show you the shirt, the coat and the tie," he said of the area, called Sacha 53, which is now pastureland and spindly trees. "They never show you the tumor underneath the shirt. " For almost a decade, celebrities, journalists and shareholders have tromped through Ecuador's jungles on competing excursions that have become a routine part of what could be the world's most expensive environmental case.

Chevron Corp. said Monday that it will cut 1,500 jobs, including 28% of its headquarters staff in San Francisco, as part of a restructuring of its domestic operations begun two years ago. "This is the last big one," Chevron spokesman Mike Libbey said of the job cuts, which the oil giant said should produce annual savings of $235 million. About 1,000 jobs will be eliminated at Chevron's headquarters, and 500 will be cut at Chevron Information Technology Co.

The public-private response to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak showed more signs of strain Sunday as members of the Obama administration bashed BP's progress even as they acknowledged they had to rely on the oil giant's equipment and expertise to plug the blown-out well. In one of the harshest government condemnations of the company to date, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said BP had blown "deadline after deadline" and had not "fulfilled the mission it was supposed to fulfill." "I am angry and I am frustrated that BP has been unable to stop this oil from leaking and to stop the pollution from spreading," Salazar said at a Houston news conference.

Chevron Corp. said Tuesday that it would buy Atlas Energy Inc. for $3.2 billion in cash as the oil giant bolsters its market position in the U.S. shale-gas business. Stockholders of Pittsburgh-based Atlas Energy will receive $38.25 in cash for each of their shares, Chevron said, plus $5.09 a share to reflect the value of Atlas Energy's stake in Atlas Pipeline Holdings, for a total purchase price of $43.34 a share. The deal includes the assumption of $1.1 billion in debt. "This acquisition is the right opportunity for Chevron," said George Kirkland, the San Ramon, Calif.

With its well finally shut down, BP is close to agreement on funneling a promised $500 million in research funds through an organization overseen by Gulf Coast governors, not the nation's scientific community. The pending decision has stirred concern among some scientists who fear most of the money will be doled out to institutions in the governors' home states — in effect making the distribution of research grants more like pork-barrel projects, rather than pure scientific pursuits.