How Shell hid a Whale before placing Mexican oil bet
LONDON/HOUSTON (Reuters) - 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. The size of Shell's cash payments - $343 million (249.04 million pounds) out of the total of $525 million that Mexico earned in the sale - far outstripped its competitors' offers, guaranteeing 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.
