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On Dec. 1 last year, Nigeria’s cabinet approved the creation of a sovereign wealth fund that would invest any excess revenues generated from the sale of the country’s oil, which it exports at a rate of roughly two million barrels per day.

This isn’t the first time that the country has made such an effort. In 2003, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, Nigeria set up the Excess Crude Oil Account, or ECA, to serve a similar purpose.

If Nigeria’s new fund succeeds in delivering tangible infrastructure improvements and other development outcomes from its oil profits, the country could become a role model for other poverty-stricken but resource-rich countries in West Africa.Ghana just began pumping oil in December, and significant reserves have recently been found off the coasts of Liberia and Sierra Leone. No doubt those countries will look to their larger neighbor to the east, the region’s economic heavyweight, in deciding how to manage their own oil revenues.

The illegal refineries are only one part of the illicit industry in Africa's biggest oil producer, and concerns have grown over its alleged international dimension. Authorities, oil firms and industry analysts say the chain of culprits and the stolen crude itself can sometimes reach far beyond Nigerian shores. "I've always said in my speeches that I believe that there are a lot of international syndicates involved," Mutiu Sunmonu, managing director of Shell's Nigerian division SPDC, told reporters recently.

Decades of oil pollution have at the same time poisoned creeks in a region where fishing had been a major source of livelihood, often with few repercussions for those at fault. Shell, Nigeria's biggest oil producer, says most spills happen due to sabotage, but activists accuse the company of not doing enough to prevent and clean them.

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

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.

In the latest showdown between western oil companies and Venezuela’s populist president, Exxon Mobil is widely seen as the loser, after the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) ruled that the world’s biggest oil company would not be entitled to most of the damages it demanded after its fields were nationalised.

Despite this recent victory, PDVSA is facing some trouble. Under Chavez, the energy giant has undertaken ambitious social spending, running subsidised food distribution programmes and international aid projects as if it were a state unto itself. Critics say oil companies should not be delivering government services. And the money used for "Bolivarian" projects means the corporation has less to invest in developing new reserves; production has dropped from about 3.3m barrels per day in 1998 to about 2.25m in 2011, The Economist reported.

Like many of its South American neighbours, Venezuela has drastically reduced poverty in the past decade; the Bolivarian Republic’s poverty rate fell from 48.6 per cent in 2002 to 27.8 per cent in 2010, according to the UN Commission for Latin America's 2011 report. Inequality also declined sharply. This progress is linked to tough negotiations with foreign oil companies, so the state can have more resources to invest in local communities, Chavez’s supporters contend.

Ghanaian President John Atta Mills says the country will learn from the mistakes of other African oil producers and save some of the revenue for future generations after production starts today. Government agreements to borrow more than $14 billion say otherwise.

“We must give thanks to God for giving us this natural asset,” Mills said after opening a tap to release oil aboard a storage ship today. “It means we are assuming very serious responsibilities. Those of us in leadership positions must ensure oil is a blessing is not a curse.”

Ghana has been overspending since the oil was discovered in 2007, with the government posting a fiscal deficit in excess of 5 percent of GDP in each of the past three years.

Forecast estimate that Jubilee oilfields can produce 55,000 barrels of light sweet oil per day. With further development of more oil wells, production could reach 120,000 barrels per day. At that rate, Ghana would soon be awash with petro-dollars, which if properly managed, would provide much-needed funds for the development of infrastructure and enhance the living conditions of the people. Before it struck oil, Ghana depended on cocoa and minerals like gold, diamond and bauxite as foreign exchange earners which it prudently utilized to build a fairly decent economy with a modest but steady four per cent yearly growth rate. With democracy now well into the third decade under a succession of enlightened and committed leadership, the country is now being touted as a model for the continent. With new-found oil wealth, the future promises to be rosier.

The case stems from oil pollution in the Ecuadorean rain forest, but Chevron does not operate there and has no significant assets in the country. It was Texaco, which Chevron acquired in a merger in 2001, that was accused of widespread environmental damage before pulling out of Ecuador in the early 1990s.

Chevron has much larger operations elsewhere in Latin America, and the plaintiffs’ strategy of pursuing the company across the region could open a contentious new phase in the case — one that would test Ecuador’s political ties with its neighbors and involve some of Washington’s most prominent lobbyists and lawyers.

Advisers to the plaintiffs said Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela would be obvious candidates to pursue Chevron assets, but they acknowledged it would not be easy. Venezuela, for instance, is a close Ecuadorean ally and its president, Hugo Chávez, is a frequent critic of the United States. But Chevron has extensive operations in Venezuela and enjoys warmer ties with Mr. Chávez’s government than just about any other American company.

When Ghanaians found out there was oil off their coast, a sense of excitement spread across the country. Optimistic and at times unrealistic statements from various company officials and ministries added to expectations.

Francis M.K. Sallah is the Regional Industrial Relations Officer for the General Transport, Petroleum and Chemical Workers’ Union. Lately he has been hearing a lot about jobs, or the lack of, in the oil industry.

The Ghanaian government says that 90% of the oil jobs should go to Ghanaians by 2020, but some people in the industry wonder why the government isn’t being more aggressive. Sallah says that right now Ghanaians could occupy more than half the posts. Welders, pipefitters, painters, maintenance people – there are plenty of skilled laborers in Ghana, so what’s keeping them from getting jobs?

But now, under these circumstances, Shell Oil claims it is not a person, subject to human law, but an entity possessing corporate immunities.

When Shell Oil walked into the U.S. Supreme Court building, this week, claiming that it is not responsible for the torture and murder of Nigerians in its oil fields in the Niger River Delta, the Dutch corporation had a friend in the courtroom: the Obama administration.

Nigeria's petroleum minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke oil giant, Shell Petroleum Development Company Ltd (SPDC) have been fingered in the shady sale of four oil blocks worth $380 billion (N58.9trillion), a petition to the Speaker, House of Representatives, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal disclosed, yesterday. The petition also alleged that two days before President Goodluck Jonathan dissolved the Federal Executive Council in 2011, officials of Shell and Alison-Madueke secretly transferred production rights in four large oil blocks, Oil Mining Licences (OMLs) 26, 30, 34 and 42, to Mr. Jide Omokore's Atlantic Energy Drilling Concept Limited, a company that neither tendered nor bidded for the blocks.

The protesters lamented what they described as a deliberate exclusion of indigenous rights of first refusal and the absence of transparent and open competitive bidding of Oil Mining Licences (OMLs) 26, 30, 34 and 42 respectively.

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.

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

What a coincidence: the world’s first major oil well, Empire, was established in 1861, in Pennsylvania, the same year the American Civil War began. With black liquid slaves gushing from the ground, there was less of a need to enslave black (or any other) humans, at least not so overtly. The new black slaves are also much more powerful, flexible, storable, transportable and tradable. Cheaper to maintain, they also don’t revolt.

Concurrent with the increase in oil and the actual wealth that it brought, we’ve also witnessed an explosion of magical or illusory wealth, in the form of images. It began with the invention of photography in the mid-19th century, just before the Empire oil well and American Civil War. With photos, then moving images, now on television, desktop, laptop, cellphone and Ipad, any man can own so much with his eyes.

Though the US has made so much noise about Tibet, it never mentions Manipur, a sovereign land invaded by an ally. The state will rob and murder, then grant you symbolic victories, such as a Martin Luther King Boulevard slicing through each ghetto, but enough of token bones tossed under the table. It’s time to overturn that table.

The House of Representatives on Thursday resolved not to let the N155 billion oil block scandal involving Nigerian government officials, two multinational oil giants (Shell and Agip), and a Nigerian company (Malabu Oil and Gas) be swept under the carpet as legislators decided to investigate the shady deal.

While the House sees a scandal in the transaction, the Senate has said it would not investigate the matter unless there is a formal petition before it. Its spokesman, Eyinnaya Abaribe, in a telephone interview told PREMIUM TIMES that newspaper reports were not enough bases for the upper chamber to investigate such a monumental fraud. “Do we just wake up and start to do our work based on reports in the newspapers?”Mr. Abaribe queried

In the U.N. Monitoring Group’s latest annual report to the Security Council’s sanctions committee on Somalia and Eritrea, the experts said the Somali constitution gives considerable autonomy to regional governments to enter commercial oil deals.But a petroleum law that has not yet been adopted by the country’s parliament but is being invoked by federal officials in the capital Mogadishu says that the central government can distribute natural resources.“These inconsistencies, unless resolved, may lead to increased political conflict between federal and regional governments that risk exacerbating clan divisions and therefore threaten peace and security,” the experts group said in an annex to its annual report, which was seen by Reuters.

“It is alarming that regional security forces and armed groups may clash to protect and further Western-based oil companies interests,” it said.

The U.N. experts also expressed concern about a clash between a longstanding bid by Norway to urge Somalia to implement an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off its coast with commercial interests by a Norwegian oil company.