Royal Dutch Shell has named Ali Al Janabi as its new head of Abu Dhabi, as it begins the process of the worldwide integration of BG after closing the US$52 billion takeover in February.
Mr Al Janabi takes over from the retiring Andrew Vaughan, who also had oversight responsibility for Kuwait and Syria.
“In his new role, Mr Al Janabi is responsible for providing governance and support to Shell’s projects in Abu Dhabi,” a Shell spokesman said.
Walid Al Nader is the new head of Shell Kuwait, and will report directly to Shell’s head of upstream, Andy Brown.
Mr Al Janabi came up through Shell’s gas businesses, underlining the company’s strategic shift away from oil to gas globally with the BG takeover.
Shell’s chief executive, Ben van Beurden, has said the company plans to sell $30bn of assets over the next two years to help finance the takeover, and he made clear yesterday that older upstream oil holdings are on the table.
“The North Sea for us will be an area where we will have to take a look, as we have to do with our entire conventional upstream, now that we have a much enlarged portfolio,” Mr van Beurden said at a gas conference in Perth, Australia. The conference on liquefied natural gas (LNG) was a good indicator of the strategic challenges facing companies such as Shell and its senior managers.
Although Shell’s BG takeover seeks to position the company for LNG’s long-term potential – with an estimated global shortfall of 75 million tonnes by 2025, according to a report by the asset-management firm Sanford C Bernstein – prices have been tumbling in the past year, and projects have been shelved or delayed, including Shell’s Kitimat project in Canada and Woodside’s $40bn Browse project in Australia.
Shell’s $12bn Prelude project, billed as the world’s first floating LNG operation, also due onstream in Western Australia, has run into long delays and cost overruns. Most of its structure is being built in South Korea, but a key part was built at Dubai’s Drydocks World.
In Abu Dhabi, Shell in January exited its 40 per cent of the $10bn Bab sour gas project, saying it “does not fit with the company’s strategy, particularly in the economic climate prevailing in the energy industry”.
The company retains an interest in the development of Abu Dhabi gas, including Bab, via its 15 per cent share of Gasco, particularly in supplying the UAE’s LNG needs through its growing gas-importation infrastructure.
The Anglo-Dutch company had also been an original 9.5 per cent concession holder in Abu Dhabi’s onshore fields operating company, Adco, which expired at the end of 2013. Shell has not ruled itself out of bidding for some of the 22 per cent of the new concession that remains up for grabs amid a negotiating stand-off.
Although Shell has not commented, Abdulkarim Al Mazi, Abu Dhabi chief of BP, which was also an original concession holder, said last month: “BP was in a stand-off with Abu Dhabi National Oil Company regarding the signing-on fee for the Adco concession bid [in February last year] ... but eventually entered the bidding process for an undisclosed amount”.
Both Shell and BP are among the few international companies with the technical know-how to meet Adnoc’s oil recovery demands for the Adco fields, and Adnoc’s recently appointed chief executive, Sultan Al Jaber, last week said Adnoc remains open to bids on Adco.
Mr Al Janabi, who is Iraqi-British, holds advanced degrees in finance as well as a master’s in engineering from Imperial College London. He is unusual among senior Shell executives in having left the company to work in banking – for Goldman Sachs – for a couple of years before rejoining in 2009. He originally joined in 2001 after a spell at the oil services company Halliburton.
amcauley@thenational.ae
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