Royal Dutch Shell announced this week that it was selling its Appalachia shale gas assets for $541 million in a transaction that wouldn’t have caught much attention if it weren’t for the fact that the oil and gas supermajor had paid nearly nine times that price when it bought the assets a decade ago. Shell’s decision to divest its Appalachia shale gas assets is a move indicative of two major trends among international majors. One is the focus on core operations and ditching underperforming assets in recent years. The other is a more recent rush of oil majors trying to dump their assets in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays amid persistently low natural gas prices which have forced supermajors—including Shell and U.S. Chevron—to write down billions of US dollars of valuations on their assets in Appalachia. In this week’s announcement, Shell said it was selling its assets in […]