Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco are splitting ways after years of joint=ownership of some of the country’s biggest refineries, and the shakeup puts American energy manufacturing directly into the hands of the Middle East.
The two companies signed a nonbinding letter of intent, a plan that would divide up Motiva’s refineries between them. The refineries have a combined capacity of 1.1 million barrels per day and are all located close to each other. The breakup will allow Saudi Aramco to take over the Port Arthur refinery and 26 distribution terminals, and Aramco will also hold onto the Motiva brand name. Shell will take over the other two refineries, Convent and Norco, both located in Louisiana. Shell said that it would operate the two refineries as one plant with a combined throughput of 500,000 barrels per day.
The split will hand the largest U.S. refinery to the state-owned Saudi oil company. The Wall Street Journalspeculates that it could also pave the way for some sort of listing of Aramco’s assets in a public offering, something that Saudi officials have alluded to for several months. Few expect Aramco to list its upstream production assets in Saudi Arabia; downstream assets are much more likely to be offered up.
America’s steps toward energy independence just took a major hit, as the American way of life remains held hostage by the whims of the Middle East. Now, should something major occur in the region, we may not just lose their oil, but ours as well.
Source: USA Today
Allan Hunt Sr; l was stationed at the Long Beach Naval Station when l was in the Navy. That facility is now a Chinese owned ship repair/drydock. Do NOT think that the government can’t transfer our posessions to another country.
we need to pump our own oil bet they have already dug into ours!!!
Saudis will do anything to raise the price of oil and our politicians will aid them.
You know they did
Same here ! Sad to see !
That is so wrong
They did it to the British in lybia, why not the rest of the middle east. Get rid of obama and we have 500 years of oil here and clean coal and natural gas along hand in hand with solar and wind. We don’t need them if politics was removed
By the way, why so suprised America corporations are selling off, it’s called greed. With the money they are making,but hey could live anywhere, wake up