First the good news. BP says its “static kill” on its Macondo well has succeeded so far, describing the moment as a “significant milestone”. The “static kill”, which started yesterday, involved pumping heavy drilling mud from the top of the...
Earlier this year Greenpeace published an excellent report showing that the secretive and arch conservative billionaire Koch brothers were the main funders of leading right wing climate sceptic organisations. Since then it has emerged that Koch brothers are bank-rolling the...
The last 24 hours of news reporting of BP’s oil spill in the UK has shifted from the devastation being wrought on the Gulf of Mexico into one where politicians and businessmen are lambasting President Obama for his “anti-British” rhetoric....
We are getting really mixed messages over what will come first: peak oil or peak supply. First of this week was BP saying global peak oil demand will happen sometime between 2020 and 2030. Then we had the UK Industry...
Whilst international attention has focussed recently on the ecological and climatic impact of the tar sands, another heavy oil boom is happening which is equally important. Just three years after a spate of nationalisations in the heavy oil belt of...
One of the unseen consequences of the lower gas prices in North America is that it is actually making it cheaper to extract the tar sands. And that in turn is giving tar sands operators the confidence to expand production....
The corridors of power in Buenos Aires would have been chortling with laughter yesterday as the British oil boom in the Falklands looked like going bust, even before it began. Over the last month, as the oil-industry hype grew, the...
Last month a group of pension funds and asset managers filed a resolution asking Royal Dutch Shell to reconsider its controversial involvement in the dirty tar sands. And now the investors are targeting BP asking it not to invest a...
A major two- year investigation by EarthRights International has found further, compelling evidence linking oil giants Total and Chevron to forced labour, killings, and high-level corruption in Burma. The important report, called Total Impact, documents how Total and Chevron’s highly...
The British military may be gone, but the British oilmen are back. Today is the day that the oil men from BP take control of Iraq’s biggest oilfield: Rumaila. It is the first important oil deal since the 2003 invasion,...
