page_title: Royal Dutch Shell
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Royal Dutch Shell / History / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: English: AURORA berthed in Sydney Harbour, Circular Quay West, before Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition The 386 ton barquentine-rigged sealer AURORA was built in Dundee in 1876. The vessel was used by Sir Douglas Mawson on his Australasian Antarctic expedition of 1911-1914. In 1914 AURORA underwent a refit in Sydney before being used to transport Sir Ernest Shackleton's Ross Sea party during the expedition of 1914-1917. During this time AURORA was beset in the ice and drifted for 9 months in the Ross Sea. In 1917 the vessel was used to rescue the surviving members of the Ross Sea party from Cape Evans.
context_page_description: Royal Dutch Shell PLC, commonly known as Shell, is a British-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in the Netherlands and incorporated in England. It is one of the oil and gas "supermajors" and the third-largest company in the world measured by 2018 revenues. In the 2019 Forbes Global 2000, Shell was ranked as the ninth-largest company in the world, and the largest energy company. Shell was first in the 2013 Fortune Global 500 list of the world's largest companies; in that year its revenues were equivalent to 84% of the Dutch national $556 billion GDP.
  Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, transport, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading. It also has renewable energy activities, including biofuels, wind, energy-kite systems, and hydrogen. Shell has operations in over 70 countries, produces around 3.7 million barrels of oil equivalent per day and has 44,000 service stations worldwide. As of 31 December 2014, Shell had total proved reserves of 13.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent.
context_section_description: During the First World War, Shell was the main supplier of fuel to the British Expeditionary Force. It was also the sole supplier of aviation fuel and supplied 80 percent of the British Army's TNT. It also volunteered all of its shipping to the British Admiralty.
  The German invasion of Romania in 1916 saw 17% of the group's worldwide production destroyed.
  In 1919, Shell took control of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company and in 1921 formed Shell-Mex Limited which marketed products under the "Shell" and "Eagle" brands in the United Kingdom. In 1929, Shell Chemicals was founded. By the end of the 1920s, Shell was the world's leading oil company, producing 11 percent of the world's crude oil supply and owning 10 percent of its tanker tonnage.
  Shell Mex House was completed in 1931, and was the head office for Shell's marketing activity worldwide. In 1932, partly in response to the difficult economic conditions of the times, Shell-Mex merged its UK marketing operations with those of British Petroleum to create Shell-Mex and BP, a company that traded until the brands separated in 1975. Royal Dutch Company ranked 79th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts.
  The 1930s saw Shell's Mexican assets seized by the local government. After the invasion of the Netherlands by Germany in 1940, the head office of the Dutch companies was moved to Curacao. In 1945 Shell's Danish headquarters in Copenhagen, at the time being used by the Gestapo, was bombed by Royal Air Force Mosquitoes in Operation Carthage.
  Around 1952, Shell was the first company to purchase and use a computer in the Netherlands. The computer, a Ferranti Mark 1*, was assembled and used at the Shell laboratory in Amsterdam. In 1970 Shell acquired the mining company Billiton, which it subsequently sold in 1994 and now forms part of BHP Billiton.
caption: Shell benzine for Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, Antarctic Expedition 1915.
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