This disturbing video from Al Jazeera shows what’s left of Chevron’s KS Endeavour gas rig, which exploded on 16 January 2012. Over 20 days later the site is still ablaze and the intense flames and plumes of smoke can be seen from the nearby fishing village. Local community activists released this footage:
Metro: ‘Sustainable’ funds investing millions in oil companies and banks. This article mentions Platform’s work on Shell Nigeria and uses it to question the ethics of investment in oil companies.
Heat or Eat? Fuel Poverty Action occupy British Gas headquarters.
In this guest blog post, Professor Anna Zalik of York University Canada explores how governments and multinationals criminalise protest and gloss over the environmental injustices of oil extraction.
Q: What does the Canadian Government’s fury at opponents of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline have to do with the Nigerian ‘legaloil’ campaign?
A: Both positions are about justifying private profits and criminalizing protest. Continue reading
On 16 January, between 4.30am and 5am, Chevron’s KS Endeavour drilling rig exploded six miles off the coast of Nigeria after the company lost control of the gas well. Two workers were reported killed. Ten days on, the fire continues to burn.
Photos courtesy of Morris Alagoa at ERA/FoE Nigeria. Continue reading
On Monday 16 January at 4.30 to 5am, Chevron’s KS Endeavour drilling rig burst into flames, approximately 6 miles off the coast of Nigeria. Two workers are reported missing. The gas rig is still said to be burning for the second day running and is reported to have partially collapsed into the ocean. The cause is as yet unconfirmed, but early reports indicate that the explosion was partly the result of a failed blow out preventer (BOP), with parallels being drawn to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The Nigerian state oil company, NNPC, speculated that Chevron’s drillers lost control of gas pressure when equipment failure led to a “gas-kick”. Continue reading
While times are hard and vast majority of us are feeling the squeeze, business is booming for oil multinationals. And it seems that companies will do anything to maximise their profits, even if tax payers bear the cost.
Oil giant Chevron is demanding a $150 million tax refund from Richmond City Council, California. News from our allies in the US confirms that public anger in Richmond, where Chevron has operated a refinery for almost a century, has sparked protests in the company’s home state and garnered further support for the global Occupy movement. Continue reading
The Western consortium developing the enormous Karachaganak natural gas field in Kazakhstan was fined $21 million yesterday for excessive dumping waste. British BG, Italian Eni and American Chevron, the companies developing the field on the the border with Russia, were convicted of environmental violations in 2008 by a regional court.
Analysts and reporters believe that the penalty is part of a pressure drive by the Kazakh state aiming to renegotiate or change contracts with private foreign oil companies. Kazakhstan is currently scrutinizing seventeen landmark oil deals it signed in the early 1990s when it had a much weaker negotiating position, many of which are now seen as being unfairly skewed towards the international oil companies by locking in favourable tax regimes.
While the Kazakh state has only recently begun to raise these issues, villagers from Berezovka, a small village located within a kilometre of Karachaganak’s sanitary protection zone have been fighting back for years. According to Crude Accountability, the gas field is spewing toxins into their community, causing serious environmental and health damage among the residents. To stop this damage, a committed group of villagers created the public organization Zhasil Dala (Green Steppe) to fight for compensation and relocation to a safe and environmentally clean location of their choosing.
Earlier in February, the first ever lawsuit filed by NGOs against the Kazakh government received a continuance. In 2004, the Kazakh government illegally reduced the Sanitary Zone around Karachaganak from five to three kilometres, exposing the villagers to highly toxic levels of pollutants. The 1,500 residents of Berezovka believe that as a result, they live in a zone that is dangerous to life. The case taken by the Ecological Society “Green Salvation” and local villagers accused the federal government of “failing to undertake measures to protect and defend the rights and freedoms of citizens”. Five other villages, consisting of nearly nine thousand people, are situated on the perimeter of the Karachaganak Field’s sanitary protection zone and experience significant negative health impacts.
If the new legal process ends positively and the lawsuit demands are satisfied, the villagers of Berezovka will be relocated. As a rule, the expenses in such cases are incurred by the company that is operating the field. However, according to a recent article in a Kazakh paper, the Karachaganak PSA ensures that all charges on foreign investors are compensated for by the Kazakhstani government – another reason to renegotiate!
The European Commission is turning a blind eye to corruption, lack of transparency and poor human rights in the repressive police state of Turkmenistan in a bid to secure future gas supplies, according to a new illustrated briefing paper from the campaign group Global Witness, launched on the eve of the 2009 oil and gas conference in Ashgabat, the Turkmen capital.
Global Witness’ report, ‘All that Gas?’ includes original artwork by satirical cartoonist, David Rees. His seven new cartoons feature EU bureaucrats discussing crude strategies to ‘get the gas’.
Just days after the report was launched, oil industry journals reported that the US has been pushing for access to Turkmen gas for American oil companies during the energy conference in Ashgabat. Chevron is apparently already in talks about taking over part of Turkmenistan’s giant South Iolatan gas field.
This follows previous pressure from the EU for a Turkmen commitment to pump gas through the proposed Nabucco pipeline. Oil companies including BP have already been trying to secure exploration licences in Turkmenistan for several years. BP has consistently been the main sponsor for the (almost) annual Turkmenistan Oil & Gas Conference. Yet again, BP is the “Platinum Sponsor” (Shell only made Silver), which seems to have netted the company two speakers on the programme Chief Economist Christof Ruehl and Exploration Vice President for New Business David Dalton. BP also hosted a cocktail party on Wednesday evening, while Total hosted a “VIP luncheon” Thursday afternoon. Developing fields under the Caspian and exporting the gas would be comparatively easy for BP, as its Shah Deniz field in Azerbaijan lies close to the marine border with Turkmenistan and its South Caucasus Gas Pipeline already pumps gas across the Caucasus and into the Turkish grid.
Can you feel
My heart is beating?
Many times she sang those words, wrapping up the pain and endurance of Niger Deltans, for years she shook the wall of indifference around her, and finally, we were moved.
On 1st October, NNEKA was awarded this years’ MOBO (Music of Black Origin) prize for best African Artist. NNEKA is an artist of rare achievement, whose outspoken views about the exploitation of the oil-rich Niger Delta burns deep into her lyrics. Her music has lifted the Niger Delta struggle into powerful songs, charging the airwaves of the BBC and the UK Top 40 with her politics.
Her story begins far away from the media spotlight in the oil-city of Warri, in the Niger Delta. A few years after she arrived on the European music scene she is now clocking up +1.5 million hits on her new music video, ‘Heartbeat’. NNEKA’s success has heightened her awareness of the development denied to her people in the Delta, in spite of the oil wealth extracted from the region.
A long-time supporter of the Niger Delta cause, and a headline artist at remember saro-wiwa events, NNEKA takes every opportunity to remind the West of the heavy cost of Nigerian oil, heaping criticism on the destructive impact of companies like Shell, Chevron and the Nigerian government.
As the BBC reports:
The singer says her influences include Nigeria’s iconic Afro-beat performer Fela Kuti as well more contemporary acts like a US rapper Mos Def.
She also cites Nigeria writer and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa as an inspiration. Mr Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Sani Abacha government in 1995 for his efforts to campaign against corruption in the oil-rich Niger Delta.
“Stand up against; corruption, against injustice, against bribery and hypocrisy…….RAISE UR VOICES,” she says on her MySpace page.
Thai oil company PTT and the Australian government are struggling to deal with an enormous oil spill of the north coast in the Timor Sea. The leak, which started on August 21st, has created a spill stretching over 70 miles by 25 miles. Yet during the same week, Canberra granted environmental approval to Chevron & Shell’s $42 billion LNG project – one of the world’s largest.
Reports seem to show that the Australian government repeatedly downplayed the scale & threat of the Timor spill, with the Australian Green Party claiming the oil is far closer to the coast than previously reported. The West Atlas oil rig, operated by Thai state oil company PTT, is thought to be leaking about 470,000 litres of oil a day since an accident caused the rig’s evacuation on August 21. Plugging the leak will take at least another week (when a back-up rig should arrive from Singapore to drill another hole), but could take another five.
The Kimberley coast is described by Tourism Australia as “one of the world’s last true wilderness areas” while the spill could be on the scale of Exxon Valdez in Alaska.
But this didn’t cause Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett to think twice before providing Chevron, Shell and Exxon with environmental approval to develop their goliath Gorgon LNG project off Australia’s North-West coast. He did say that the “key focus” had been on “whether Gorgon’s expansion could manage the potential effect on the flatback turtle”. (Oil companies like to focus in on how they will protect certain rare species – BP emphasised how it would take care of the turtles in Sangachal and Ceyhan as part of its BTC project as well).
The project will super-cool 15 million tonnes of gas every year from the Gorgon gas fields, liquefying it so that it can be transported to Chinese, Japanese and US markets. In total the fields hold 40 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Shell owns 25% of the project, so will receive 3.75 million tonnes of gas each year. The company already agreed to sell more than half of this - 2 million tonnes a year to Chinese state company Petrochina every year for 20 years. Kathleen Eisbrenner, Executive Vice President of Shell Global LNG, signed the 20-year contract in November 2008 in Beijing.
Kathleen Eisbrenner, Executive VP of Shell Global LNG