UK Regulator Trying To Block Release of Shell North Sea Documents – Slashdot

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Everyone ultimately profited from the oil. Shell paid massive amounts for the exploration rights. Every liter of fuel that has been sold has brought many times that in taxes and levies, all in the name of environment and climate. Then use those taxes for what they were intended for, clean up the environment. Shell does not own the fields, it is just extracting the oil and gas.
That sounds fair. So if Shell has completely adhered to all of the terms of the various contracts and paid all of the necessary taxes, there’s no reason not to release the environmental reports, is there?
I think it is quite reasonable to expect industries to pay to clear up their waste after them, not just to expect the tax payer to do it.
We could have that kind of model, of course, but then you expect significant extra taxes to account for it.
Why should Shell be allowed to profit from it at all? It should have been a nationalized company with profits going into a sovereign wealth fund from the very start. Scotland could have been rich if they had been able to exploit their natural resources themselves.
Instead all they got out of it were a few well paid jobs and a lot of pollution, with a big clean-up bill as a final “fuck you”.
On the other side of the North Sea, Norwegians have some of the best quality of life in the world, with a huge oil fund
Because… bribes

if the company does not clean up then the government must.
Must what? Nationalize Shell Oil? I agree.

It’s no wonder they don’t want anyone reporting on the state of the remaining platforms.
When you build big things, some are going to fail. Not just Piper Alpha, but Ocean Ranger and Deepwater Horizon among others. Ships also sink, bridges collapse, planes crash, dams break, and reactors melt down. Best to try and learn from these experiences rather than running back to the safety of the caves.
Indeed. And what any sane society should do is put these assholes in prison long-term and remove all their and their companies’ money.
Wouldn’t you rather have a large untraceable bribe?
I was thinking the same…what the hell does this phrase even mean?

UK Regulator Trying To Block Release of Shell North Sea Documents
Someone did, or signed off on, something shady — and probably got paid for it.

Challenge: go a week without oil and anything that relies on it.
No one is arguing that we still have a dependence on oil.
The topic at hand is about how an oil company is dodging responsibility and cost for cleaning up after itself after it has done stripping the resources that it was given access to for a pittance and made huge profits from.
In 2021-2022, the UK government made GBP 1.4 b from oil and gas. Shell alone made GBP 32.2bn in 2022, with BP also making GBP 27.2bn. I think they make enough to be able to pay for their own cleanup, don’t you?
UK Govornment revenue
Maybe you’re onto something there, but then, Shell might well ask, “What were all those political contributions for?”
Next, you’ll want them to pay a fair amount of Income Tax [independent.co.uk].
I think it is fair to say, as long as contributions by the wealthy fuel political ambitions, this game of writing your own rules will continue. Anyone for term limits and government funding of political campaigns?
Shell made the profits.
Shell must clean up.
It’s a simple rule, and not difficult to do.
Shell’s war profits could pay for the clean-up 100x over. Brits got unbelievably shafted there but that’s not enough for these bloodsuckers.

Then you’ll probably realize that we all create the mess that we’re asking oil companies to clean up, so it’s fair that we pay for it.
That’s some fucked up logic. The saner amongst us understand that we still need oil for moving our cars, making the plastics we use, and the 1000 other uses. All we ask is that those whom we empower to profit off extracting that oil clean up after themselves. That’s what this argument is about. They’ve made billions upon billions of dollars extracting and selling the oil, they can use some of that profit to clean up after themselves when they are done.
How the fuck does something like this get modded as “insightful”? I assume the mods are the same group that have no problem leaving a disaster at a restaurant table because “it’s their job to clean it up” not theirs.

The saner amongst us understand that we still need oil for moving our cars, making the plastics we use, and the 1000 other uses. All we ask is that those whom we empower to profit off extracting that oil clean up after themselves. That’s what this argument is about.
I kinda agree with your perspective. However, it’s crucial to recognize that the reason behind the remarkably low cost of oil, and fossil fuels in general, is precisely because the companies extracting them are not held accountable for the negative externalities [corporatef…titute.com] linked to their production. These externalities primarily include pollution during extraction (usually impacting the local environment) and the emission of greenhouse gases upon combustion, contributing to the pressing issue of climate change (usual

and the emission of greenhouse gases upon combustion
Hell, I’d be reasonably OK even ignoring this part of it. I’m begrudgingly willing to accept that we (currently) need to burn it to drive our cars/trucks/etc. I really don’t want to get into a global warming discussion… It’s been “discussed” on here to hell and back, and nobody is changing their position on it.
For the rest of it, it’s like any other industry: You make a mess, you clean it up. OP’s “you wanted them do dig the oil out, therefore they shouldn’t be responsible for their mess” comment absol
Look at Norway. The oil wealth went into helping them transition to EVs, so now they don’t need nearly as much of it to power their vehicles. In fact they have been ripping out petrol and diesel pumps and replacing them with EV chargers.
Similarly, they have moved to heat pumps for heating. They work great in the extreme low temperatures of the Arctic Circle.
We could have had all that in the UK too, but let Shell take it all as profit and shareholder payouts.
but let Shell take it all as profit and shareholder payouts.
If you’d any significant contact with North Sea operations, you’d know that “Shell Expro” (the UKCS entity) is a 50:50 partnership between Shell BV (the Dutch multinational) and Esso (now “Exxon”). 50:50 on development costs ; 50:50 on profits ; and now, 50:50 on decommissioning costs.
I did write several pages on platform (“steel jacket” and “gravity base”) construction – and the implicit decommissioning costs. But the Slashdot “security” demon at
The alternative is that we “windfall” tax the shit out of them and do the cleanup using tax payers money. We have already taxed them for “excess” profits, but that was to help with the pandemic. Ideally this sort of cleanup would have been factored in to the tax planning for oil companies from the very start, but obviously wasn’t.
What’ll actually happen is the taxpayers will pay for the cleanup, and we’ll forget about the taxation part.

… Then you’ll probably realize that we all create the mess that we’re asking oil companies to clean up, so it’s fair that we pay for it.
Sure, no problem. Release all the documentation so I can see exactly what I’m paying for. Your “challenge” doesn’t negate the benefits of transparency. And *if* someone/body did something shady, there better be a pretty good explanation for why we, and not they, should be paying for it.
Challenge: try to make oil companies clean up.
I can’t see how any politician or regulator would have an issue with this. They are all above board, never lie, and excellent stewards of the environment. Plus, its not like oil companies have let us down so far. They always clean up their messes and are known to be “friends to the environment”.
” Most of the cells are the size of seven Olympic swimming pools, and collectively still contain an estimated 72,000 tonnes of contaminated sediment and 638,000 cubic metres of oily water. ”
Don’t mix units. If you’re going to use metric units, just use metric units.
We don’t need to send our olympic swimming team out into the middle of the North Sea to swim in oily water.

It’s all metric: Tonnes (not tons), Olympic-sized = 50 metres, & cubic metres. However, Olympic-sized only specifies one dimension; length, not width or depth so it’s not a particularly consistent measurement of volume.
Quite. The UK is a utter fuster-cluck of different measuring systems. We typically use metres and centimetres for length, area and distance but will use miles and yards for roads and cars. Milk is sold in (Imperial) pints* whilst flavoured milk is sold in litres. Petrol is sold by the litre but fuel efficiency is still measured in miles per gallon. Colloquially, the units of measurements are “London busses end to end” for length and distance or “Wales” for area,

*A proper British (Imperial) pint is 568 ml
I never really got why Olympic swimming pools was used as a unit. London busses, okay, most people know more or less how big a double decker bus is. But how many have experienced an Olympic size swimming pool?
Pretty much everyone in Australia has access to a public Olympic size swimming pool, and surely most people globally have seen them on TV during sports broadcasts.
Nothing says, “perfectly safe” like “you can’t see the evidence”.
As a former environmental hazmat inspector, you are correct. A site assessment is typically done to determine if it needs to be maintained in place, or removed (or simply contained and buried)
The exception was when it came to hazardous liquids, those were always removed, regardless of the condition of the container they were in. At least according to my state’s regs (some federal regs were more relaxed, but the stricter rule always took precedence)
Democracy in action…
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