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ix Acknowledgments This book benefits from the contributions of many individuals. Before thanking and acknowledging them, a little background is necessary. In 1998, the president of Shell Oil Company, Phil Carroll, contacted University of Houston oil historian Joseph Pratt about commissioning a history of his company, the U.S. affiliate of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, then the second-largest oil enterprise in the world. Already at work on the history of Amoco, Joe guided the project to me. As a business historian researching the topic of offshore oil and gas, I found this an exciting opportunity. Shell Oil was the undisputed leader in moving oil and gas operations into deep ocean waters, a major technological development in the history of oil and of modern business more generally. In early discussions, Joe and I tried to interest the company in a book about Shell Oil’s offshore achievements. Although such a book would sacrifice details about aspects of the company, we argued this was the most compelling story. Shell, however, wanted a comprehensive history that included refining, chemicals , marketing, and so forth. They saw this book as a gift to the company’s employees and retirees, and it would be impolitic to exclude whole departments and functions. This issue of audience never fully resolved, I agreed to write a comprehensive history. Constant corporate reorganization threatened the project from the very beginning. A month after the project started, Phil Carroll announced he was leaving Shell Oil. Oversight of the history from within Shell then shifted from the president’s office to the public affairs department, a weak player in the corporate hierarchy whose impulse to turn the book into a puff piece had to be constantly resisted. Public Affairs did resell the project to succeeding presidents, but Rob Routs, the third one in four years, was not buying. It eventually became clear that Carroll’s objective in commissioning the history had been to preserve the legacy of a company that was about to disappear, to capture its history before senior people left or died, taking their knowledge with them. We did not make it in time. x Acknowledgments The management changes instituted in 2002, as the book was in page proofs, represented the final dissolution of the U.S. Shell Oil Company. Shell Oil ceased to exist as anything other than a collection of companies overseen by different parts of Royal Dutch/Shell. Drastic budget cuts were imposed on the U.S. operations , including the closing of the Shell Museum in Houston, a wonderful exhibit of artifacts and displays, and the termination of the history book project. The new management team came from the “downstream” side of the business—refining, marketing , and chemicals—whereas the strength of the old Shell Oil was “upstream,” in finding and producing oil and gas. The new executives apparently did not want to celebrate the history of their U.S. affiliate, whose partial ownership by public shareholders prior to 1985 had produced a semi-autonomous management structure that sometimes created tension with the majority shareholding parent. By 2002, the Shell people in Houston who cared about this history were either gone or too afraid of losing their jobs to push the matter. The new management, which answered to superiors in London and The Hague, cut funding to print the book. The news disappointed the many retirees who gave interviews and helped with the book project, especially the offshore veterans who were rightly proud of their accomplishments. Our services agreement contract with Shell Oil gave Joe Pratt and me editorial control and control over final disposition of the manuscript. But rather than try to publish the book against Royal Dutch/Shell’s wishes, I decided to write an entirely new history of Shell Oil’s offshore business, the kind of study we had originally proposed to the company. This independently researched and written second book was expressly permitted in the contract. The offshore veterans were enthusiastic about the idea. Most of them allowed me to use their oral histories for the new book and facilitated another round of interviews and research. This book is indebted to those Shell Oil alumni. Beyond their careers at Shell, they have preserved the community they created there, meeting every other year at a reunion in Galveston, Texas. This enduring network helped pull together the many strands of narrative and memory into a coherent history. Their oral histories fill the book with drama and life...

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