Shell halts Alaska exploration

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell is stepping up asset disposals as part of a strategy that will see the company "changing emphasis" in 2014. The changes will involve Shell stopping its exploration programme in Alaska. On Thursday, Shell posted 'clean' profits - which strip out the impact of oil price movements - of $2.9 billion (£1.7 billion) for the last quarter of 2013, down from $5.6 billion on the period in 2012. It comes a week after Shell issued a "significant" profits warning. New chief executive Ben van Beurden, a month into the job, said on Thursday that "the landscape the company had expected has changed". On 17 January, Shell, the world's third-largest publicly-quoted oil company, surprised investors with a warning about profits for the quarter to the end of December, blaming high exploration costs, pressures across the oil industry and disruption in Nigeria, according to a news agency.