Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSB) feared it could lose up to 80% of its oil license acreage in Nigeria after the country's new Petroleum Industry Bill is passed, according to comments from Shell's former executive vice president in the region, Ann Pickard, that appear in U.S. Embassy cables published by Wikileaks.

"We could lose 80% of our acreage" under new rules that would redistribute undrilled license areas, Pickard said in a meeting with U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission in Abuja, Dundas McCullough, on Oct. 13, 2009, according to the cable.

"The PIB will redefine how a company can hold on to its exploration and production blocks, limiting what can be kept to two kilometers around each well," the cable said.

"Everyone offshore loses a lot...we will have to bring satellite [fields] on fast or we will lose the blocks," the cable quoted Pickard as saying.

However, companies are struggling to drill wells fast enough because of long delays in getting offshore drilling rigs through the Nigerian approval process, the cable says.

A Shell spokesman said: "We cannot comment on the alleged contents of the cable, including the correctness or incorrectness of any statements it allegedly contains."

Nigeria has yet to pass the PIB and several different draft versions of it exist currently. Nigerian presidential aide, Hassan Tukur, said last month he still hopes the law would be passed by year-end.

At a meeting in Lagos in February 2010 with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Johnnie Carson, several oil company executives harshly criticized the PIB, according to another cable published by Wikileaks.

Peter Robinson, a vice president for Africa at Shell, told Carson that the Nigerian authorities do not understand how the oil industry works. "Amateur technocrats run the oil and gas sector...They believe that they can control the industry via spreadsheets and pushing through the PIB," the cable quotes Robinson as saying.

"Politicians believe that they make no money on deep-water projects. Potential banker and businessmen partners do not understand the industry," Robinson said, according to the cable.

Pickard also said at the October 2009 meeting that there would be benefits from the PIB. "The creation of fully integrated and independently functioning international joint ventures would solve the oil and gas industry's longstanding funding problems," if correctly implemented, the cable says. "The proposed division of responsibilities between the NNPC and the Directorate of Petroleum Resources also would be good," it says.

Pickard said Shell's position on the PIB was in, "total alignment with the international oil companies at every level," and, "the Nigerian companies are with us."

Pickard is currently Executive Vice President for Shell's upstream operations in Australia , a role she assumed in March.

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