For The Archives -- Shell, XOM, NAM -- Natural Gas -- Europe -- September 7, 2022

This interests me not, but it seems important for the archives.

Link here.

LONDON (Reuters) - Shell and Exxon Mobil have put up for sale one of Europe's largest and oldest natural gas production ventures, betting on soaring energy prices amid tensions with Russia to attract buyers. 

The top two Western energy giants could raise over $1 billion from the sale of the 50-50 NAM joint venture in the Netherlands, two industry sources said.

It would be part of both companies' efforts to shed ageing assets that are no longer central to their operations.

Shell and Exxon recently launched the sale process for NAM’s offshore gas operations, which include dozens of fields and around 20 offshore platforms, as well as a network of pipelines and three processing plants.

NAM started producing natural gas in 1963 following the discovery of the giant Groningen field and has been a major source of gas for the Netherlands and Europe for decades.

Its output has nevertheless been in a steady decline since 2014 and is set to fall further in the coming years after the Dutch government decided to shut Groningen in order to limit seismic risk in the region. The field is expected to shut down in 2023 or 2024 but its life could be extended.

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The Book Page

Stephen King.

All 75 books. 

Ranked.

Link here.

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Never Too Old

Sterling Lord.

Literary agent.

Among other triumphs worked for years to find a publisher for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, has died. He had just turned 102.

From the linked article at The Guardian:

Sterling Lord, who started his own agency in 1952 and later merged with a rival to form Sterling Lord Literistic, was a failed magazine publisher who became, almost surely, the longest-serving agent in the book business. He stayed with the company he founded until he was nearly 100 – then decided to launch a new one.

He was an early ambassador for a revolutionary cultural movement: the Beats. He endured the initial unwillingness of publishers to take on Kerouac’s unorthodox work and was later the agent for the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, novelist Ken Kesey and poet and City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Thanks to his friendship with Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss, Lord helped launch Stan and Jan Berenstain’s multimillion-selling Berenstain Bears books. He found a publisher for Nicholas Pileggi’s mob story Wiseguy and helped arrange the deal for its celebrated film adaptation, Goodfellas.

In the early 1960s, Viking asked Lord to get a blurb from Kerouac for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey’s first and most famous novel. Kerouac declined but Lord ended up representing Kesey.

He represented the former US defense secretary Robert McNamara and John Sirica, the judge of Watergate fame, and worked with Jackie Kennedy during her time as an editor with Doubleday and Viking. Some of the great US sports books of the 20th century, from North Dallas Forty to Secretariat, were written by Lord clients.