Legislative Answer
Shell is attempting to "have its cake and eat it too" by both being able to sell off all its dirt, equipment and buildings but still retain the right to sell gasoline through the retailer network it built up over decades of gasoline retailing in the United States.
This is one of the slickest moves any major oil company has ever tried to pull off. It sheds all the environmental liability that has been assigned to Shell through decades of legislation and environmental rulings that are entirely base on who owns the dirt and equipment. At the time the legislation was passed, it was assumed that the Major Oil Companies would always own the dirt and equipment and that the liability for environmental spills would remain with the gasoline manufacturers. There were a few exceptions called independant retailers and independant distributors, but for all intents and purposes the major oil companies were still on the hook. All this has changed. Shell has clandestinely sold off all it can of its retail service stations in the United States using extremely tight time tables for retailers to buy their stations and making them sign non-disclosure agreements so the public and regulators would not find out and impede it in anyway. What is needed is legislation that does either or both of two things:
The major manufacturers of gasoline need to be responsible for any environmental problems caused by their product independant of whether they own the dirt and gasoline retailing equipment, including tanks, lines and dispensers.
The practice of signing retailers to long product agreements with substantial penalites needs to be ended. It is not the long product agreements that are the problem,
it is the severe penalty if the retailer chooses a more competitive supplier. It is a non-competitive monopolistic devise with the sole purpose of maintaining retail distribution so that major oil companies can dump their retail environmental liabilities.
Locking the retailer into penalty agreements is what shifts all the environmental responsibilities away from Shell yet keeps the exact same benefit of using those locations to sell its gasoline through its "
penalty product agreement monopoly." This scheme has a monopolistic price effect that keeps the price of gasonline non-competively high while at the same time dumping all of Shell environmental liabilities on the retailer, insurance industry and through higher prices the public and consumer. It isn't fair to let Shell or any other major oil company get away with this slight of hand manuever when all environmental laws and regulations were aimed at making them responsible for the product they sell if it negatively impacts the environment. And it is. Shell has a slew of line leaks, tank leaks and monitoring failures (see
Recent Settlement). We need to introduce legislation that at least allows more competition or makes the Oil Companies responsible for there products by legislating the liability to the manufactures and distributors of motor fuel independant of whether they own the dirt. Environmental can and should be made dependent on oil companies providing the product and monopolizing retailers into having to sell it via penalty agreements.
Here's the simple equation: When oil companies make more money with less liability to the environment, the public gets screwed. This is hidden gouging of the public interest. It is not a public good to let Shell get away with it, as the other major oil companies are sure to follow.