Discovery

Reuters is reporting that Royal Dutch Shell knew something that no one else did and were able to hold their cards close to their chests. It’s rumored that the gasps in the audience were clearly audible at the auction of Mexico’s oil blocks a month ago as Royal Dutch Shell’s hefty bids were announced one by one. Shell’s cash payments of $343 million, out of the total of $525 million that Mexico earned in the sale, guaranteed that the company swept up nine of the 19 offshore blocks. Six months earlier, its drilling rig had struck a giant oil reservoir, the Whale well, in the U.S. side of the Gulf of Mexico – just across the border from many of the Mexican blocks, which share a similar Paleogene-age geology. “Post the Whale discovery we had some geological insights. It is not by acc...