Shell Ramping Up Gulf of Mexico Production

Shell has safely redeployed another 227 personnel on Tuesday, September 16th. The company's total compliment of offshore staff is approximately 550. Redeployments will continue and should be up to needed working levels within the next 2-3 days.

Some Shell operated production in the company's East operations area was started on September 15th and is currently at 26,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (Total Gross). There is some production constraint due to downstream pipeline infrastructure pressures that will improve as those systems come back up to normal operations. While Hurricane Ike did not damage our East area assets, we still have remaining repair work at some locations (Mars, Ursa, West Delta 143 and Cognac) from Hurricane Gustav that could not be completed before we evacuated for Ike. As mentioned earlier, we are also using this downtime to complete some regular maintenance work at several of these facilities that was scheduled, prior to Gustav and Ike, for later this month. We currently expect the bulk of the remaining production in the East area to start up late this weekend and into mid next week.

In our West operations area, staff at the assets closer to the eye of Hurricane Ike's track are ensuring safe conditions, completing damage assessments, commencing repairs and preparing for production restart procedures. Drilling operations will commence in several locations over the next day or two. Production ramp up at each facility will vary, depending on repairs and downstream oil and gas infrastructure readiness. We expect production restart and ramp up could commence at some locations over the next day or two and ramp up into next week also.