Royal Dutch Petroleum Company

Parent Company Royal Dutch Petroleum Company... 

Royal Dutch Petroleum Company RD plastics Owns 64% Royal Dutch Shell... 

The history of Shell as a real oil enterprise began in early 1890, when Marcus Samuel Junior made a visit to Batum on the Black Sea from where Russian oil from Baku was imported. The businessman was very impressed by the scale of operations. He saw a large market for kerosene in the Far East where it was used for lamps and cooking. Unfortunately, American Standard Oil Trust had a monopoly on the business. So, Marcus had to find a way to undercut prices. Quite separately, the Dutch company, Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, was formed to develop an oilfield in Pangkalan Brandan in Sumatra. Established in the Hague, it enjoyed the support of King William III of the Netherlands. 

The activities of Shell took place both in neutral Holland, and in Britain and, to a smaller extent, in Germany, from 1906. Then, a year before their merger, both the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company and Shell began research and development on so-called aromatic intermediates (i.e., simple chemicals which can be converted into more complex substances, such as explosives and dyes) from petroleum. Three years later, a production unit for nitrobenzene and nitrotoluene(s) came into operation at a site near Diisseldorf, Germany. During the war, research in the Netherlands intensified and extended to the conversion of nitrocompounds into dyestuffs and explosives. TNT factories were erected in Britain and The Netherlands, and serious attempts were made to establish a synthetic dye business. After the war, however, work on these aromatic chemicals appeared to be of no commercial value, and in 1919, Shell s board of directors stopped research and production in these fields. Therefore, at first glance, it seems that these war time activities were without significance for the future of the company. 

Parent Company Note Royal Dutch Petroleum owns 60%... 

In 1903, the Shell Transport and Trading Company and Royal Dutch merged together into the enterprise called Asiatic Petroleum Company. The partnership between these two enterprises worked so well that four years later, in 1907, it was extended to operations world-wide, with the creation of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies. The two parent companies retained their separate businesses and own the Group, with more than 1,700 active companies, in the proportion of 60% to Royal Dutch Petroleum and 40% to Shell Transport and Trading Company. 

Both big British oil companies, British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell directly ... 

The other significant consolidation was British Petroleum s acquisition of the two most successful U.S. companies that entered petrochemicals during World War II Amoco in 1998, and Arco shortly thereafter. By early 2003 there were five major players in international petroleum markets—in order of their revenues, ExxonMobil, BP Amoco, Royal Dutch Shell, ChevronTexaco, and ConocoPhillips—all still producing petrochemicals. 

The story of the chemical activity at Royal Dutch begins in 1905, when Henry Deterding, the general manager of the Asiatic Petroleum Company - the sales cartel of the oil producers in the Dutch Indies, which included the British Shell... 

Staff of Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies (1983) The Petroleum Handbook, 6th edn, Elsevier, Amsterdam. 

The Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum Company 1890-1950, Diamond Jubilee Book, Nijgh and Van Ditmar NV, The Hague, 1950, p. 75. 

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