Shell looks to LNG boost from Russia

Russia has invited Royal Dutch Shell to take part in the Sakhalin-3 and Sakhalin-4 oil and gas projects in Russia's Far East.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made the offer at a meeting with the company on Saturday. Putin said the projects will require Shell's experience in deep offshore extraction.

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The company has been active in exploring Russia's Far East since the Sakhalin-2 project in the 1990's. Together with Gazprom, Shell is building Russia's first Liquefied Natural Gas plant, with Putin saying he supported Shell's plans to increase production.

“We know about your plans to expand the LNG plant to increase the output. This will ensure supplies for the domestic market and the Asia – Pacific region.”

Shell has also signed a deal with Russian shipbuilder Sovcomflot, which will provide it with LNG tankers. Several days before the meeting, Shell's vice-president Chris Finlayson spoke on perspectives of LNG use exclusively to RT.

“LNG is certainly the way forward. It’s the dominant form of delivering gas in the Pacific basin, which Sakhalin is uniquely positioned to serve – its only 2 and a half days sailing time to Tokyo. Gas flows from as far away as the Middle East to Japan, so you can see the advantage that exists there. Pricing is based on oil, in that Pacific basin market, and also it’s very well positioned for delivering into the United States, and to Southern California and into Mexico where there are also contracts that both ourselves and Gazprom global LNG trading have. It’s a profitable way, an effective way of delivering a premium fuel. That’s why of course, in Europe, many countries are building LNG terminals as well. There will be clearly competition between pipeline gas, LNG gas, and LNG gas has to be competitive to grow in those markets too. So I think it is very much a fuel where we see significant growth, not just for a few years but for the next few decades, both because of the lower carbon content but also because of the efficacy and the ability to deliver that fuel to any destination worldwide.”

RT: How do Shell’s activities in Russia differ from those in other emerging markets, particularly the other BRIC countries?

CF: “We have operations in all of the other BRIC countries indeed. I don’t think that I would say that our approach varies greatly between the countries. In all of the countries we work together with the state companies in the upstream sector. And in all the countries we see downstream entries, and Russia has been somewhere where we have put a lot of effort into – we are the largest foreign lubricant seller in Russia, we are the only foreign company that does refueling of aircraft in Russia.”

Housing construction withers in the wait for funding

Russia's housing construction sector has been hit hard with the mortgage market needing new sources of capitalization before it can become affordable enough to boost building.

Residential construction in Russia has slumped, with developers mired in debt, and state funding for new housing facing cuts. President Medvedev stressed that even the 4% growth in new real estate placed on the market, represents last year's construction. The sector needs subsidies and renewed demand in order to take off. That's unlikely to come from the mortgage market.

Home loans fell more than six-fold in the first three months of this year, as interest rates rose and banks slashed lending and tightened loan requirements. Sergey Polonsky, head of real estate developers, Mirax, says current loan rates of around 20% are unaffordable for most people.

"The programme for subsiding loan rate is still not in place, so not a single rouble has reached the construction firms so far. According to our research, people are only ready to buy at 7% interest rate,"

The government is trying to stimulate construction. The state mortgage agency is getting $6.5 billion to refinance long-term mortgages given to borrowers by private banks, according to Oleg Repchenko head of analysis centre, IRN.ru.

"The reserves or pension fund money might be used in order to make the loans cheaper. It is possible to subsidise the loan rate relatively quickly. Construction of the real estate will take much longer. Last year showed that there is more movement toward lowering rates, but construction was slowing down at the same time,"

President Medvedev has called upon banks to lower mortgage rates, but that will be possible only if the government provides "cheap" money injections or it succeeds in lowering inflation which will naturally cut interest rates .

Korea Braces for a Credit Card-Less Society

Korea is bracing for a ``credit card-less'' society but legal and technical barriers are still lingering.

Mobile phones are already masquerading as televisions and Internet devices, providing stock info, news alerts, games and video cameras. But next, handsets are expected to replace plastic credit cards.

Mobile phone carriers said the intriguing possibility is near at hand. Ideally, wireless users will be able to pay phone bills, taxes, shopping expenses, transport fees and hospital bills with their handsets. This would make plastic cards or paper money almost obsolete.

SK Telecom and KT said users of data-enabled, third-generation (3G) handsets are now capable of doing a limited range of financial services with microchips inserted into the phones.

SK Telecom has more than 10 million users with handsets that are embedded with universal subscriber identity module (USIM) chips, or smart cards that contain user information and process data.

``The very goal of inserting USIM cards was to enable financial services, and credit card capabilities are the last frontier,'' said an industry watcher.

``Currently, mobile operators are merely the middlemen connecting consumers with conventional financial service firms, but they are exploring the possibilities of establishing their own financial service units.''

Telecommunications operators have high hopes for the Lee Myung-bak government's efforts to ease the cross-ownership restrictions between financial and non-financial services.

The National Assembly is currently reviewing the possibility of allowing non-financial companies to own financial units, such as credit card and securities firms.

Should the restrictions be lifted, SK Telecom is moving to acquire Hana Card.

Legal issues aren't the only obstacles to the mobile wallet. An SK Telecom executive said that the conventional ``combi-type'' USIM cards, which can store data up to 144 kilobytes, wouldn't be powerful enough to support the expanding range of transactions services.

And unlike plastic credit cards, which users can take with them all over the world, geography still matters in mobile payment.

A new technology called near field communications (NFC) could provide a solution to both of the problems.

NFC is similar to radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and is considered crucial for the mobile wallet as the chips inside the phones store personal information and act as credit cards.

If NFC is adopted as a global standard, users will eventually be able to take their handsets abroad and pay for hotel rooms and souvenirs.

KT, the country's biggest telephone company and No. 2 wireless carrier, plans to release an NFC-enabled USIM chip with 256 kilobyte storage early next year and also develop a 1-gigabyte USIM. SK Telecom is also developing NFC-based USIM chips.
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