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
Shell sponsorship: there's something unsettling about the Shell branded baby blankets in this hospital in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Nevertheless, corporate sponsorship and community projects cannot absolve oil companies like Shell for creating a health crisis and human rights tragedy in the Niger Delta.
EU oil companies including Shell and Total will be banned from importing and purchasing Iranian oil by new sanctions, reported Reuters. As Iran threatens to retaliate by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a major artery of global oil shipments, the UK foreign minister William Hague downplayed the likelihood of war.
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
The global oil price wavers around $100 a barrel as traders are split over whether Brent Crude is about to plummet due to the Eurozone disaster getting worse, or about the spike due to a renewed Middle East crisis. It is snowing in Fort McKay, in Nothern Alberta, and the temperature of -6 feels like -11 with the strong north westerly wind. The long winter of the boreal forests has settled in. Production continues at Shell’s open cast Albion tar sands mine on the lands of the Athabascan Cree around Fort McKay, for with the world price at one hundred dollars, it’s a profitable exercise. But questions are being raised over Shell’s longterm prospects in the province.
Platform, in collaboration with Greenpeace UK and Oil Change International, have just published ‘Getting to Market – Emerging Investor Risks in the Tar Sands’, written by Lorne Stockman. The industry plans to increase production by 138% from todays level in the next fifteen years. But the report shows that this growth in the extraction from Alberta is being put at risk by the inability of producers to get the resources, dug or steamed from beneath the forests, out to the world markets. With the Canadian province entirely land locked, and the market for oil products in the US Mid-West becoming saturated, projects in Alberta will increasingly depend on being able to get tar sands derived crudes out to the oceans of the world. Expanding projects along the steep growth curve that producers have planned depends on being able to transport the bitumen from the tar sands to the refineries of US coast of the Gulf of Mexico or the refineries of East Asia via the tanker terminals on the Canadian West Coast. 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
On Friday 14th October, Texas governor and US presidential candidate Rick Perry unveiled his ‘jobs and energy’ policy which “resembles a wish list for the oil and gas industry” according to the New York Times. The plan, available online, involves scaling down the “job-killing” Environmental Protection Agency and opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. It also involves “leveling the playing field for all energy industries by eliminating subsidies” – hang on, double check – yes, Perry means eliminating “subsidies and loan guarantees for inefficient and uncompetitive green energy programs”.
The argument that cleaner energy would be economically uncompetitive without subsidies is not new – what’s less commonly discussed is the level of subsidies needed for new oil extraction. Continue reading
On Friday 2 September, Wikileaks finally published the full batch of over 250,000 US diplomatic cables. The unredacted cables are now available online. The decision to dump the data in the open has landed Wikileaks in further controversy and drawn condemnation from its former media partners around the world, due to the possible risk of harm or danger to individuals named in the cables.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time. As interest in the story waned at The Guardian and other media outlets, Wikileaks engaged a wider range of partners, including 234NEXT.com in Nigeria, to leak country specific material. But the sheer number and size of documents would put any media organisation under strain, and within a few weeks 234NEXT had moved on like its predecessors. The task of editing and redacting the material presented a substantial burden which nobody seemed able to bear for too long.
Over the year, PLATFORM was able to provide timely analysis of cables that exposed Shell’s infiltration of the government of Nigeria, BP’s cover up of a major offshore gas leak in Azerbaijan, ENI’s corruption in Uganda and UK firm Heritage offers to bribe officials in Congo. Now, 9 months after the first cables were released, we will be able to look deeper into the cables and expose the oil industry’s hidden channels of power, influence and abuse and the role of our governments have played.
I challenge anyone to find a more cynical example of corporate sponsorship than this one.
(Thanks to @Adammaanit in Brighton and @MsVanessaMurray in Australia for bringing it to our attention).
In the same week that Shell was condemned by the UN for its devastating oil spills in Ogoni, and admitted liability for 2 massive spills in Bodo village in the Niger Delta, the company announced that its sponsorship of an oil spill clean up competition in the US:
Shell has announced that it is a supporting partner of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, a global competition to develop the most effective oil spill cleanup equipment.
10 teams from Northern Europe and the United States will compete for prize money, with Shell’s Peter Velez, global emergency response manager, judging the scores.
The team with the highest oil recovery rate and highest oil recovery efficiency will get $1m first prize; second place will get $300k and third place $100k.
So while the Ogoni people continue drink water contaminated with hydrocarbons 1,000 times higher than the legal limit, and have their land and fisheries turned into toxic dump, they can at least rest in the knowledge that Shell cares far more about its image than it does about their suffering.
If you feel it, tweet it:
“Shame on @Shell for decades of doing nothing to clean Ogoni oil spills.”
It’s 22nd July 2011, and another arts, fossil fuel sponsorship, censorship story breaks. There’s a furore over a newly commissioned public sculpture at the University of Wyoming. Wyoming is a US state which mines more coal than any other in the union. The piece, called Carbon Sink, What Goes Around Comes Around by British artist Chris Drury draws the link between coal, climate change, and the pine beetle infestation that is devastating the Rocky Mountains because the climate no longer gets cold enough in winter to control their numbers. The trouble is, the University is heavily backed by the fossil fuel industry, and Carbon Sink has provoked a wounded wail: “They get millions of dollars in royalties from oil, gas and coal to run the university, and then they put up a monument attacking me, demonising the industry,” said Marion Loomis, the director of the Wyoming Mining Association… “I understand academic freedom, and we’re very supportive of it, but it’s still disappointing.” Drury was surprised. “I thought it was a fairly innocuous thing to do. But it’s kind of upset a lot of people here. Perhaps it was slightly more obvious because it is slightly more crucial in this state. But this is a university so I expected to start a debate, not a row.” Tom Lubnau, a Wyoming state legislator commented “While I would never tinker with the University of Wyoming budget… every now and then, you have to use some of these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University about where their paychecks come from.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/22/wyoming-university-coa…
In 2003, PLATFORM collaborated with new economics foundation and Corporate Watch on a report “Degrees of Capture: Universities, the Oil Industry and Climate Change” which examined the relationship between Britain’s universities and oil industry sponsorship of research and facilities, and how that relationship has a bearing on climate change. Amongst many other significant findings, the report found that the then balance of university-based energy research and development (R&D) significantly increased our dependence on fossil fuels, and undermined the development of renewable energies, thus going directly against other government directives such as the 2003 Energy White Paper which set a target for the UK to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide by 60% by 2050. The detailed report caused a lot of useful outraged responses, especially from universities in Scotland, and the Scottish Executive, many of former being heavily backed by the North Sea oil industry.
http://www.platformlondon.org/carbonweb/showitem.asp?article=99&parent=9
In 2004, at the invitation of the Institute for Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Bath, we created a exhibition and conversation from Degrees of Capture which addressed the following questions:
What constitutes an ethical relationship between academic research and a business sponsor or partner?
To what extent are these relationships between academia and business part of a public relations function, in the same way as companies sponsor cultural and arts events?
To ensure academic freedom, shouldn’t academic institutions or individuals develop an ethical policy for engaging with business?
http://www.bath.ac.uk/icia/archive-old/exhibitions04.shtml
In these days post Browne Review of Higher Education where the free market is being given a massive thumbs up and even arts courses are being driven to position themselves as good for business, it’s time to regroup. Browne is Lord John Browne, ex-Chief Executive of BP, Chair of Tate’s Board of Trustees, and lover of opera, owner of a palazzo on the Grand Canal. The recent reinstatement of the arts, culture and higher education areas of public life that should be governed by market forces, and not as a civil society “good” (however problematic) has been given a huge boost under Browne’s recommendations, which must be resisted.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/s/10-1208-securing-s…
New Wikileaks cables about another major offshore gas leak in the Caspian give a rare insight into how BP attempts to control the public narratives when it hits crisis and failure. Writing a book about the company’s Caucasus pipelines, we’ve been all over the region, digging for the truth behind these events. Now the sudden release of documents allows a glimpse into the company’s preferred world of secrecy and back-room meetings.
On 17th September 2008 BP scrambled helicopters and rescue vessels to reach the Central Azeri oil rig far out in the Caspian Sea. Lying 130 kilometers offshore from Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku, the country’s largest platform was threatening to explode, with gas leaked rapidly from the seabed,. All 212 staff were rapidly evacuated and the platform was shut down, as were its sister platform, West Azeri. Oil production from the company’s Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli oil field (ACG) plummeted by 500,000 barrels per day.
As the Guardian’s publication of cables relating to the gas leak have revealed, BP was eager to prevent even its commercial partners knowing the full extent of the near disaster. The oil field is run by a consortium of ten companies, including ExxonMobil and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR). With oil prices high, the shut-down meant a daily loss of $50 million. The gas leak was slashing BP’s partners’ revenue streams, so unsurprisingly Exxon et al were uneasy being kept out of the loop.
Given the importance of oil revenues to Azerbaijan’s budget, state pressure for disclosure might be expected, as Capitol Hill forced BP to provide live streamed video of the Macondo leak in May 2010. However the Wikileaks cables make clear that BP came under no such pressure in Azerbaijan, illustrating the close collusion between company and the Azeri autocracy. President Ilham Aliyev’s government recognises BP’s operations as crucial to propping up his regime, and extremely tight control of the Azeri media ensured that there was next to no coverage of BP’s crisis. The company’s position in the country is so dominant that the head of BP Azerbaijan is widely seen as the second most powerful man in the country .
When the gas leak struck threatening disaster for the Caspian Sea, both BP and the Azeri government were already uptight and nervous over their export pipelines, recently shut down by a combination of Kurdish rebel attack and the Russia-Georgia war.
Barely one month earlier in August, a vast explosion had ripped through the wooded valley near Refahiye in Turkey. Sheets of fire 80 meters high shot into the sky followed by an immense column of smoke as 30,000 barrels of oil from the Azeri fields went up in flames. The fire raged for 6 days, troops were deployed and government ministers arrived by helicopter. The ccompany’s pipeline was shut down and BP declared force majeure claiming ‘an act of terrorism’. Visiting the place of the explosion nine months later, farmers nearby were extremely reluctant to describe how their fields were covered in ash and the temporary evacuation of a village. In large part their silence came from the perception of this foreign-owned pipeline as a Turkish ‘state project’ and thus should not be criticised.
With their primary pipeline shut-down, BP routed Azeri oil through a back-up route. But on the night of 7th August 2008 a Russian fighter flew low near the village of Alkahi- Samgori in eastern Georgia, dropping bombs across a wide valley of grazing land. The Georgian government announced an attempted bombing of the pipeline, whilst BP strenuously denied this was the case. With repeated Russian bombing runs, Georgian Ministers kept making public statements to the West, hoping the US and NATO would be alarmed by the gravity of such an attack on one of Europe’s oil supply lines. But BP had no interest in a news story about the threats to its oil infrastructure; a company executive in Tbilisi told us they chose to ‘close down’ the story. Only five days after this first aerial attack, BP quietly shut down the pipeline. Eight months later, we stood in one of those craters peering out at the pipeline marker posts just yards away.
Within the month, disaster struck again, although this time it was a technical failure and BP’s own fault. But with all the turbulence over the previous months, the company wanted to keep the dampers on media coverage and avoid another story about its failures to run safe and secure operations in the Caucasus and Caspian. The Wikileaks material illustrates how one of the UK’s largest corporations chose not to share crucial information with even its closest partners, actively engaging and disengaging the media in constructing the public narrative of events.
James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello of PLATFORM are co-authors of the forthcoming book The Oil Road – to be published by Verso in June 2011.
Cables released by the Guardian on BP in Azerbaijan include:
Aliyev changes tune after Georgia invasion, says BP
BP says ‘rush job’ by Turks on gas pipeline is ‘not inconceivable’
BP under fire over handling of gas leak incident
BP blames gas leak on ‘bad cement job’
BP may never know cause of gas leak, US told