MOSCOW (MRC) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s biggest oil company, reported an increase in first-quarter earnings on new projects and refining, according to Bloomberg.
Earnings excluding one-time items and inventory changes rose 3 percent to USD7.5 billion from a year ago, Shell said today in a statement. That beat the USD6.4 billion average estimate of 11 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Chief Executive Officer Peter Voser will retire in 2014.
Shell was "aided by the cold European winter and the benefit of a full quarter’s contribution from Pearl" gas-to-liquids project in Qatar, Lucas Herrmann, a London-based analyst at Deutsche Bank AG, said before the report was released.
U.K. gas prices were about 25 percent higher in the first quarter from a year earlier because of higher demand for heating. Shell is the fourth-largest gas supplier from the U.K. North Sea fields and together with Exxon Mobil Corp. is pumping the fuel from the Dutch Groningen field, one of the largest in the world.
Shell plans to raise volumes to about 4 million barrels a day as soon as 2017. The company has boosted output at its USD19 billion Pearl venture, reaching full capacity in January after a delay of about six months.
As MRC reported earlier, in February, 2013, Royal Dutch Shell took a final investment decision to increase production capacity at its Singapore petrochemical plant to meet demand for specialized materials used in the automotive and furniture industries. The upgrade will increase the plant's capacity to produce polyols -- industrial chemicals used to make high-quality foams -- by more than 100,000 tpy to 360,000 tpy. The project is expected to be completed in 2014.
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
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