Shell USA

Royal Dutch-Shell began operations in the United States in the 1910s. Early acquisitions included William Miller Graham's California Oilfields Limited in 1913. The present company formed when two Royal Dutch-Shell subsidiaries, Shell Oil Company of California and Oklahoma's Roxana Petroleum, merged with the Union Oil Company of Delaware.

Shell drilled the Alamitos oil well in Signal Hill, California in 1921.

In 1979, Shell purchased Belridge Oil Company for $3.65 billion, which at the time was called the "biggest cash takeover in American history" by US government sources. Shell also invested in offshore oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1997, Shell and Texaco entered into two refining/marketing joint ventures. One combined their Midwestern and Western operations and was known as Equilon. The other, known as Motiva Enterprises, combined the Eastern and Gulf Coast operations of Shell Oil and Star Enterprise, itself a joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Texaco.

After Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001, Shell purchased Texaco's shares in the joint ventures. In 2002, Shell began converting these Texaco stations to the Shell brand, a process that was to be completed by June 2004 and was called "the largest retail re-branding initiative in American business history".

In recent years, The Shell Oil Company's Midstream, and Downstream, in particular, have become limited to petroleum, and chemical products. This has come as a result of Royal Dutch Shell breaking off its Natural Gas and power businesses into a new segment named Integrated Gas. The Shell Oil Company's former Natural Gas, and energy divisions are now Shell Energy North America, a closely integrated, but a distinctive entity that runs across North America and is headquartered out of Houston, Texas.

In June 2025, news broke of Shell seeking to acquire competitor BP in what would be the largest oil deal in decades.

On August 6, 2025, it was announced that Shell would be ceasing the operations of Volta Charging (originally acquired and merged its operations with its Recharge Network in 2023) by November and would be shutting its 2,000 charging stations and laying off 190 employees. A selection of those employed at Volta are eligible to reapply at positions through Shell.

Legal issues

Environmental

Shell Puget Sound Refinery, Anacortes, Washington, was fined $291,000 from 2006 to 2010 for violations of the Clean Air Act making it the second most-fined violator in the Pacific Northwest. As of 2011, it has been listed as a "high-priority violator" since 2008.

In 2008, a lawsuit was filed against Shell Oil Company for alleged Clean Air Act violation. Shell Deer Park Refinery 20 miles east of Houston, was the nation's eighth-largest oil refinery and one of the world's largest petrochemical producers. The facility was also the second-largest source of air pollution in Harris County, which ranked among the lowest in the nation in several measures of air quality. According to Sierra Club and Environment Texas, analysis of Shell's reports to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, air pollutants released at Deer Park since 2003 exceeded the EPA's emissions limits.

Will Oremus from Slate magazine states, "The company's business depends on being able to anticipate and respond quickly to seismic shifts in the energy market. So it employs a team of big-thinking futurists, called scenario planners, to keep it a step ahead. In 2008, the company released a fresh pair of scenarios for how the world might respond to climate change over the coming decades. Both were predicated on what the company called 'three hard truths': that global energy demand is rising, that the supply of conventional energy will not be able to keep up, and that climate change is both real and dangerous."

Polybutylene lawsuit

Between 1978 and 1995, Shell Oil produced polybutylene pipes, which corrode when exposed to chlorine. A class action lawsuit was filed in 1995 against Shell Oil when the polybutylene pipes caused flooding in many households in the U.S. and Canada. The settlement required Shell Oil to pay for the re-installation of piping for millions of houses for claims filed through May 2009.

Campaign violations

About 6,000 Shell workers and contractors were instructed to attend a Donald Trump speech held on August 13, 2019, or take the day off without pay, losing about $700 from overtime and per diem. During his address, Trump called out specific union leaders to declare their voting loyalty. Many of the union leaders present were not consulted before the event, and memos sent to contractor management forbade any protest. Federal law prohibits a corporation from making a contribution.