But in early April Royal-Dutch Shell broke the silence in a big way with the proposed acquisition of BG Group. If successful, the $70 billion deal will be among the biggest since the spate of mergers at the end of the 1990s — another period of plummeting oil prices — when BP acquired Amoco and Arco, Chevron merged with Texaco, and Exxon and Mobil became a single moniker.
The
