At Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s (RDSA) compound in the Nigerian city of Warri, the gate is locked, the grounds are empty and grass has overgrown since Europe’s biggest oil company closed its operations in March after more than 40 years.
After Warri saw some of the nation’s worst unrest in two decades, Shell has sold land-based fields that pumped about 400,000 barrels a day in the 1990s, valued at $1.2 billion a month at today’s crude prices, and is buying fields offshore.
International oil companies including Shell and Chevron Corp. (CVX) are shifting their efforts in Africa’s largest producer from land-based operations to offshore fields, where the risk of kidnapping, sabotage and crude theft is lower. The increased security also brings costs that are more than 40 percent higher, according to estimates from Nigeria’s national oil company.
