Group items tagged

The film explores the connections between the Ghanaian company who finds the oil field, the small Texas oil company who drills, the Wall Street private equity partners who invest, and the Ghanaian government officials who manage the contracts. The glitch, depending on your seat, comes when Ghanaian leadership changes, the justice department is called in to investigate allegations of corruption on the part of the U.S. firm and credit contracts due to the financial crisis.

Boynton also looks at the psychological motivations for the individual players, all striving to be masters of the universe, or in West African parlance, "big men." Rolling Stone spoke with Boynton about her cautious optimism for Ghana, the legacy of Milton Friedman and working with Brad Pitt and Sebastian Junger.

The fundamental question in the movie is who gets what out of the deal and so then the question is whom is pitted against whom in the deal. You’ve got private capital – Wall Street – you’ve got the oil company, you’ve got governments and you’ve got the people. And those are the principal entities looking to get a piece of the pie.

“If governments are not going to step up to the plate, ... others are going to move in,” said Alex Vines, the African research director for London-based Chatham House. “Private security providers are licking their lips in anticipation of coming in and making good money.”

The secessionist state of Somaliland has signed a production sharing agreement with DNO, a Norwegian oil and gas company.

However as at today three years after it came into existence as a law, the stipulations on allocation of the number of new expatriates or extension of stay of those already in the country to work in a company or particular project is only on the paper used in writing the Content Act.

The foreign operators have abused their allowed expatriate quota with impunity simply because they have found ways of circumventing the system that was supposed to monitor compliance. Some companies even bring in all kinds of funny “expatriates” under the guise of expertise without recourse to approval from any government monitoring agency.

These agencies either for outright lack of will power to be honest and do the right thing approve applications for expatriate quotas allocations and variations without recourse to existing Regulations and so you see even cooks and washer-men, security men, mechanics amongst many others  work in Nigeria as expatriates with unthinkable pay.

An Energy Analyst, Muhammed Amin Adam has told Citi Business News, the current delays in the completion of the gas infrastructure project could allow the Jubilee Oil field partners minimum flaring opportunity.This is as a result of the current operational challenges government is having with the lead contractor on the SINOPEC project.China’s SINOPEC has threatened to abandon the project following serious financial challenges government is confronted with in paying SINOPEC for pre-financing the project.

“in this case the law also allows that you can flare for operational reasons and you can flare when you are compelled to. So in this circumstance when we are not ready with our gas infrastructure they are compelled to flare, in that case we will have no course to make any case against them”.

"The Chinese government is courting disaster with this round," said Adam Zuckerman of environmental and human rights organization Amazon Watch. "These blocks are the most controversial in Ecuador and there's already a list of companies who have tried to drill there and have failed. Drilling in some of the most pristine regions of the Amazon would not only violate the rights of local communities, it would break China's own laws."

The battle for oil in the Amazon has often been overlooked recently due to the fight to keep oil companies out of the Arctic. But the threat remains and is set to get much worse

It is over twenty years since Judith Kimerling’s ground-breaking booklet Amazon Crude was published into the devastation of oil in Ecuador by Texaco. If you have never read Joe Kane’s stunning book Savages on the shocking cultural impact of Amazonian oil, you should add it to your reading list.

The latest warning about oil’s lethal legacy has come from neighbouring Peru.  On Monday, the country’s government declared an environmental state of emergency in a remote region of the rainforest near the Ecuadorian border, inhabited by the Quichua and Ashuar indigenous groups

Attending the roadshow were black-suited representatives from oil companies including China Petrochemical and China National Offshore Oil. "Ecuador is willing to establish a relationship of mutual benefit – a win-win relationship," said Ecuador's ambassador to China in opening remarks.

Critics say national debt may be a large part of the Ecuadorean government's calculations. Ecuador owed China more than £4.6bn ($7bn) as of last summer, more than a tenth of its GDP. China began loaning billions of dollars to Ecuador in 2009 in exchange for oil shipments. More recently China helped fund two of its biggest hydroelectric infrastructure projects. Ecuador may soon build a $12.5bn oil refinery with Chinese financing

Once this surge in U.S. energy production was linked to a predicted boom in energy from Canada’s tar sands reserves, the results seemed obvious and uncontestable.  “North America,” he announced, “is becoming the new Middle East.”  Many other analysts have elaborated similarly on this rosy scenario, which now provides the foundation for Mitt Romney’s plan to achieve “energy independence” by 2020.

Perhaps the most notable example of this was Shell Oil’s costly failure to commence test drilling in the Alaskan Arctic.  After investing $4.5 billion and years of preparation, Shell was poised to drill five test wells this summer in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off Alaska’s northern and northwestern coasts.  However, on September 17th, a series of accidents and mishaps forced the company to announce that it would suspend operations until next summer — the only time when those waters are largely free of pack ice and so it is safer to drill.

Only after promising to take immensely costly protective measures and winning the support of the Obama administration — fearful of appearing to block “job creation” or “energy independence” during a presidential campaign — did the company obtain the necessary permits to proceed.  But some lawsuits remain in play and, with this latest delay, Shell’s opponents will have added time and ammunition.

The Angolan government, led by reformed socialist strongman President Jose Eduardo dos Santos since 1979, has recently touted its oil wealth, economic growth and social stability to attract foreign investment, but avoids the topic of political repression and glaring economic disparities. Rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticized the government's use of violence to silence critics, exemplified by the recent attack on the 10 activists in Luanda. "This brutal beating highlights the ongoing threat of violence that anyone speaking up for free speech in Angola faces," Muluka-Anne Miti, Amnesty International's Angola researcher, said in a statement.

They pointed at the Policy, Government and Public Affairs Department of Chevron as the ''dirty trick'' arm of the oil company in the Gbaramatu ''crisis project'', alleging that a similar scheme by the company had earlier claimed the lives of three community youths.

In the mean time, efforts to get Femi Odumabo, an engineer and the oil company's General Manager in-charge of the Policy, Government & Public Affairs Department, did not pay off, as he was said to be attending to some ''urgent matters''.

Just a few miles from Rukwanzi six Congolese were killed in September 2007, shot at by the Ugandan army while they travelled in a passenger ferry from the island to the DRC shore. It was revealed last week that Heritage Oil and Gas, the British wildcat explorer founded by former mercenary Tony Buckingham, played a key role in triggering that military operation after its staff had crossed illegally into Congolese waters.

The reckless actions of a British oil company could conceivably have led to war. That it did not reflects Congolese weakness and Ugandan calculation. There were fears in Kinshasa at the time that Jean-Pierre Bemba was likely to return from Belgium with Ugandan support. Laurent Nkunda's CNDP was engaged in its strongest offensive to date in North Kivu and the old Ugandan interventionist tendency was increasingly on show.

Now the oil majors are entering the market, they are using a different argument - that the wider regional choice means they must be incentivised to invest in one country over another. When China National Offshore Oil Corporation (Cnooc) struck a deal with Tullow to develop Uganda's fields, it warned Museveni that there wasn't time to wait for Parliamentary debates over the issue - pausing now could mean Uganda losing its winning lottery ticket to Kenya or Ethiopia.