page_title: Shell Oil Company
section_title: Environmental
hierarchical_section_title: Shell Oil Company / Legal issues / Environmental
caption_attribution_description: English: Shell Puget Sound Refinery on the south end of March Point; Padilla Bay (behind); Fidalgo Bay (foreground)
context_page_description: Shell Oil Company is the United States-based wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, a transnational corporation "oil major" of Anglo-Dutch origins, which is amongst the largest oil companies in the world. Approximately 80,000 Shell employees are based in the U.S. Its U.S. headquarters are in Houston, Texas. The current president is Bruce Culpepper, a graduate of the University of Alabama. Shell Oil Company, including its consolidated companies and its share in equity companies, is one of America's largest oil and natural gas producers, natural gas marketers, gasoline marketers and petrochemical manufacturers.
  Shell is the market leader through approximately 25,000 Shell-branded gas stations in the U.S. which also serve as Shell's most visible public presence. At its gas stations Shell provides diesel fuel, gasoline and LPG. Shell Oil Company was a 50/50 partner with the Saudi Arabian government-owned oil company Saudi Aramco in Motiva Enterprises, a refining and marketing joint venture which owns and operates three oil refineries on the Gulf Coast of the United States. However, Shell is currently divesting its interest in Motiva.
context_section_description: Shell Puget Sound Refinery, Anacortes, Washington, was fined $291,000 from 2006 to 2010 for violations of the Clean Air Act making it the second most-fined violator in the Pacific Northwest. As of 2011, it was listed as "high priority violator" since 2008.
  In 2008, a lawsuit was filed against Shell Oil Company for alleged Clean Air Act violation. Shell Deer Park facility, 20 miles east of Houston, was the nation's eighth-largest oil refinery and one of the world's largest petrochemical producers. The facility was also the second-largest source of air pollution in Harris County, which ranked among the lowest in the nation in several measures of air quality.  According to Sierra Club and Environment Texas, analysis of Shell's reports to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, air pollutants released at Deer Park since 2003 exceeded the EPA's emissions limits.
  Will Oremus from Slate magazine states, "The company's business depends on being able to anticipate and respond quickly to seismic shifts in the energy market. So it employs a team of big-thinking futurists, called scenario planners, to keep it a step ahead. In 2008 the company released a fresh pair of scenarios for how the world might respond to climate change over the coming decades. Both were predicated on what the company called 'three hard truths': that global energy demand is rising, that the supply of conventional energy will not be able to keep up, and that climate change is both real and dangerous."
caption: Storage tanks and towers at Shell Puget Sound Refinery, Anacortes, Washington
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