CAIRO, 17 June — Prince Abdullah, the regent, will meet the chairmen of ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell to clear the way for three multi-billion-dollar gas projects, a report said yesterday.
The meeting with ExxonMobil’s Lee Raymond and Shell’s Phil Watts will take place on June 23 in Jeddah, the report quoted London-based International Oil Daily (IOD) as saying.
Prince Abdullah “would like to hear first hand why the negotiations are taking so long to complete... but it is not a make-or-break meeting,” said the report, quoting a Saudi source.
Meanwhile, a meeting between Saudi negotiators and the chairmen of ExxonMobil and Shell over the gas projects, scheduled for yesterday, has been delayed by a week, a Western oil executive said in Riyadh yesterday.
The talks with Lee Raymond and Phil Watts had been set to start yesterday but have now been rescheduled for June 22-23, the executive, who requested he not be named, told AFP without giving reasons for the delay. “The talks have now moved from the technical to the political level because a deal needs a push and guidelines from the top,” the executive said.
The talks will be followed by a meeting between Raymond and Watts with Prince Abdullah on June 23.
ExxonMobil has the lead in two projects, while Royal Dutch Shell has the lead in the third project, together requiring initial investments to the tune of $25 billion.
The government in June 2001 selected eight companies, split into three consortia, two led by ExxonMobil and one by Shell. They were tasked with bringing a gas field on stream and to build facilities that will use their production as feedstock for electricity, water desalination and petrochemical plants.
However, after 12 months of negotiations and two missed deadlines — in mid-December and March — talks to finalize the agreements have remained deadlocked over the terms of the investments required from the companies.
