EER: Shell's Pearly Gates

In the early 2000s, BP surpassed Shell as the largest European oil and gas company (and the world's second largest private oil and gas company after ExxonMobil). You can be sure that this hurt at Shell's headquarters in The Hague.

Those days, however, are beginning to fade into distant memory. While BP got mired in the Gulf of Mexico and Russia, Shell steamed steadily ahead: it overtook BP again on the biggest-company-list in 2006.

You have probably heard the story: the Dutch-British energy giant successfully revised its strategy after its disastrous reserves crisis of 2004, henceforth focusing on a limited number of technologically complex mega-projects (and increasingly on gas rather than oil). That is true, except that actually the new strategy had already been set in motion before 2004: the reserves crisis temporarily obscured the long-term course Shell had taken.  MORE