General Thoughts, page-4486

Yup huan, like Total, Shell is gatvol (extremely fed-up) with the ANC regime.

Hopefully the ANC has learnt their lesson and will be more exploration-friendly on the Orange Basin blocks.
The new GNU helps, but as said before the same ANC idiot is still in charge of petroleum exploration.

The delay and blocking of seismic for their Wild Coast exploration blocks was the last straw for Shell, but there was plenty else, as Prof Bonang Mohele says via BizNews;

Coming directly to Shell, they applied to do hydraulic fracturing in two lots, on the Karoo, but also offshore.
They ultimately got the offshore license, but the one in the Karoo never came.
We did what we could in four years to demonstrate beyond any shadow of doubt that this can be done safely, effectively and efficiently.
We took some of these legislators to safe operations in the United States where we have done this safely and have converted this into game farms where the growth and the thriving of game is evident, but that wasn’t given.
We were given 20 million US dollars to drill 24 wells each. That’s 1.4 billion rands.

Four years later, Shell had to say, bring back the money, had we put it in the bank, even at 10% interest, we would have had better return on income.

Now they started the Euro 5 specification on their refinery with engine or NREF across and NARTREF, but also CARTREF. So the first part we did, we did the front end engineering and design at a cost of 50 million US dollars.We wanted to be fully compliant with Euro 5 specifications after taking out lead from our fuel, especially diesel.
We had only three things to deal with. One was let’s agree the specification. The second was when is the implementation date. We set 2017. And then we had to speak about the cost recovery mechanism.
We even shared with this government what is done by South Eastern Asian countries with refineries that look like ours, with almost the same tenure, 30 to 50 years, and say, these are the three things that they’ve done.
And again, there was absolutely no progress because of ideology that held us hostage.
This government could not see themselves giving four billion rands to the five refineries to fully comply with Euro 5 specifications and then they just disappeared.

So Shell having been here for more than 120 years, they look and say, you know what, we are in 114 countries.
Why are we tearing our hair out for clearly a country that does not need our services and our products?