BG Group plc was a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in Reading, United Kingdom. On 8 April 2015, Royal Dutch Shell announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire BG Group for $70 billion, subject to regulatory and shareholder agreement. The sale was completed on 15 February 2016. Prior to the takeover, BG Group was listed on the London Stock Exchange (BG.L) and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. In the 2015 Forbes Global 2000, BG Group was ranked as the 583rd largest public company in the world. Prior to its acquisition by Shell, BG Group had operations in 25 countries across six continents and produced around 680,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. It had a major liquefied natural gas (LNG) business and was the largest supplier of LNG to the United States. As at 31 December 2009, it had total proven commercial reserves of of oil equivalent. History Origins The company was created in 1997 when British Gas plc divested Centrica and became BG plc, which was reorganised in 1999 as BG Group plc. 2000 to 2016 On 23 October 2000, a further demerger separated the company into Lattice Group and BG Group. Lattice took ownership of Transco (the gas transporter for the UK), Advantica (gas engineering and consultancy specialist) along with the property and transport companies and BG Group took ownership of gas fields and other assets. In 2002, Lattice merged with National Grid Company to become National Grid Transco which was renamed National Grid in 2005. In September 2007, BG Group delisted its ADRs from the New York Stock Exchange. Instead its shares began trading on the US over-the-counter market. In June 2008, BG Group made a US$13.1 billion bid to acquire Origin Energy, Australia's largest coal-seam gas producer, but were outmanoeuvred by ConocoPhillips, who offered to invest US$9.1 billion in a joint venture with Origin. However, in October 2008, BG Group bought Queensland Curtis LNG for US$3.4bn in order to operate in Asia's liquefied natural gas market, and on 1 November 2010, BG Group announced plans to invest £9.3bn on the world's first project to liquefy and ship gas produced from coal deposits – the first in a series of "coal seam methane" projects in the region of eastern Australia; by late 2014, this was sending gas produced from coal deposits by pipeline to a terminal in Gladstone on the