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20 Shell Investors’ Handbook
Upstream
is particularly important for working at
night. Several manufacturers are already
supplying LNG-powered engines for a
range of vehicles. As a fuel for ships, LNG
is not a new idea. Ocean-going LNG
carriers have been using it for more than
45 years. Shell has been a pioneer in such
shipping, with an excellent track record in
terms of the safe storage and handling of
LNG.
We see the main growth opportunities in
the near term to be in road transport and
coastal or inland shipping. Increasingly
stringent emissions regulations, abundant
supplies of competitively priced natural gas,
and the sheer scale and pace of demand
for fuel are driving these opportunities.
In 2011, Shell took the final investment
decision on the Green Corridor project. It
will develop a retail infrastructure for the
supply of LNG along a busy truck route in
the province of Alberta, Canada. The LNG
will be supplied from a 0.3 mtpa plant
near Calgary based on Shell’s innovative
low-cost Moveable Modular Liquefaction
System.
GTL
Almost 40 years ago, Shell began
researching how to convert natural gas
into liquid fuels, lubricants and chemical
feedstocks. In 1993, this gas-to-liquids
(GTL) technology became a commercial
reality when the Shell Middle Distillate
Synthesis plant started up in Bintulu,
Malaysia. All in all, Shell has filed more
than 3,500 patents covering all stages of
the GTL process.
We used our proprietary technology and
operational experience with GTL to build
Pearl, Shell’s and Qatar Petroleum’s massive
plant in Qatar. Ten times bigger than the
Bintulu plant, Pearl is the world’s largest
GTL plant and one of the largest industrial
developments in the world.
Both trains of the Pearl project have started
production, with the first commercial gasoil
shipment from Train 1 having taken place in
June 2011. At peak production capacity,
Pearl will take 320 thousand boe/d of
gas and turn it into 140 thousand boe/d
of GTL products and 120 thousand boe/d
of natural gas liquids and ethane. This
amounts to almost 8% of Shell’s worldwide
production, making it the company’s
main engine for growth for 2012. Over
its lifetime, Pearl will process about three
billion boe from the world’s largest single
non-associated gas field, the North Field,
which contains more than 900 tcf of gas.
PRODUCTION
In 2011, hydrocarbon production available
for sale averaged 3,215 thousand boe/d,
which was 3% lower than in 2010 and 2%
higher than in 2009. Excluding production
lost from divestments, 2011 production was
approximately the same as it was in 2010.
Production in 2011 was mainly driven by
new projects coming on-stream, notably
Qatargas 4 LNG and Pearl GTL in Qatar,
the Athabasca Oil Sands Project expansion
in Canada and the continued ramp-up of
the Gbaran-Ubie project in Nigeria. New
start-ups and the continuing ramp-up of
fields more than offset the impact of field
declines and the effect of higher prices on
production-sharing contract entitlements,
but were further offset by lower demand
due to warm weather in Europe in the
fourth quarter of 2011 and increased
maintenance activities compared with
2010.
� Workers at the Pearl GTL plant, Qatar.