A window of opportunity in Burma

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Sam Hatfield| Leave a comment

Times are changing in Burma. Once it was risky to even say her name, now you can buy an Aung Sun Suu Kyi t-shirt on the streets of Yangon. Suu Kyi has long been a symbol of hope for Burmese people; David Cameron described her as a “shining example for people who yearn for freedom, for democracy, for progress” in his recent visit to the country. The landslide victory for Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party in April’s by-election has certainly given Burmese people real hope. Whilst parliament remains dominated by the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and its allies, the prospect of open political debate is for the first time in decades starting to look realistic. Continue reading →

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Posted in Asia, Burma

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Why oil must be on the agenda in Rio

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Sam Hatfield| Leave a comment

You don’t often hear the words “oil” and “development” in the same sentence. And if you do, then more often than not the discussion revolves around the discourse of the “resource curse” – the discovery of oil offers a guaranteed route to corruption, violent conflict, environmental degradation, exploitation of local peoples and, well, downright misery. Maybe we’re not comfortable with the idea that the black stuff coming from some of the world’s poorest and most unstable regions, is driving much of our economy. So when it comes to sustainable development we’re much happier to talk of intelligent urban design, fair trade coffee and cow farts.

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Posted in Other OpenOil blogs

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FARC’s new Big Oil strategy in Colombia

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Lucy Wallwork| Leave a comment

Two events have propelled Colombia into the pages of international newspapers in recent weeks. The second was last month’s hosting of the Summit of the America’s, held in the sun-drenched port of Cartagena – despite walk-outs and spats over the Falklands, the event was widely touted as celebrating Colombia’s miraculous “comeback” from a mal-functioning narco-state to take its place alongside Brazil and Argentina as a new regional powerhouse. The first however was the historic commitment made by the FARC to put an end to the practice of kidnapping for extortion, one of their most controversial sources of funding both among Colombians and the international community. But how to read this gesture calls for a closer look at what is really at stake for the guerrilla.

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Posted in Colombia, Latin America, Uncategorized

EITI in the US: the invisible empire of oil (Part 3)

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Amrit Naresh| Leave a comment

Growing up in Louisiana, the fourth-biggest oil producing state in America, I pretty much took the oil industry for granted.

It was everywhere, of course. I saw the sprawling refineries, heard about the jobs created and the oil occasionally spilled, but it was so omnipresent that I almost didn’t notice it. Like someone from Paris who doesn’t do a double-take at the Eiffel Tower, or a California kid who assumes every place in the world has a golden coast.

Louisiana’s coastal marshes aren’t golden; they are steeped in oil, and the state’s political and economic fortunes have risen and  fallen with this black ‘gold’ . Decades of back-room wheeling and dealing between oil men and state politicians – who, as it happens, are often one and the same – have made that perfectly clear. But despite its ubiquity and its pervasive economic impact, the oil industry in Louisiana seems to slip by the state’s citizens almost unnoticed. It remains an ‘invisible empire’, in the words of former governor Huey Long.

So somehow it makes sense that it took me moving thousands of miles away to Germany, after living in Louisiana for eighteen years, to remove this oily blindfold and begin to understand the paradox at the heart of the petro-culture in my home state.

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Posted in EITI, Other OpenOil blogs, Transparency, Uncategorized, United States

‘Cite du Petrole’: A Rare Snapshot of Big Oil’s Glory Days

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Lucy Wallwork| Leave a comment

The glossy “corporate social responsibility” pages of an oil major’s website are a heroic but stilted effort to resist the barrage of hostile public opinion towards ‘big oil’ (boo ,hiss), an industry which has become a byword for underhand dealings, pilfering and dishonesty.  However it has taken the discovery of little-known documentary Cite du Petrole to remind me that this vitriolic reaction to the sector was by no means always the case.

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Posted in Azerbaijan, CIS, Companies, Uncategorized

The story of Niger, or how not to have an oil boom while your people starve

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Johnny W| 1 Comment

There can’t be many countries who face famine as their GDP rises by 14%. Yet that is the situation in the West African state of Niger, where the World Food Program, the International Red Cross, Oxfam and other humanitarian agencies launched appeals this week to help some 400,000 people now at risk from severe malnutrition. At the same time as an oil boom kicks in and IMF analysis predicts a rise in government income of 30% in 2012.

How can this happen? And how can something better happen instead?

I’d like to suggest three initiatives which would improve the lives of millions of Nigeriens at risk immediately:

  • That the Nigerien government suspends its capital expenditure program to make funds available for emergency relief.
  • That foreign oil companies producing in Niger’s new field, China’s CNPC and Algeria’s Sonatrach, defer cost recovery claims by enough to allow all necessary emergency supplies to be bought.
  • That the governments of the Sahel region, where up to ten million people are going hungry again this year, create a regional stabilisation fund using petrodollars from new and established industries in Chad, Mauritania and Niger. The World Bank and IMF could provide technical expertise and match funds.

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Posted in Africa, Niger, Uncategorized

Syria’s transit future: all pipelines lead to Damascus?

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Amrit Naresh| 2 Comments

Between the rise of Hafez al-Assad in 1971 and the crisis engulfing his son’s government today, the Syrian energy sector seems to have come full circle.

An oil importer in the 1950s and 60s with little production of its own, Syria became a net exporter of oil by the 1980s; it is now a country whose depleting reserves will lead to petroleum imports soon exceeding exports once again. With oil production approaching an apparent dead end, the Syrian government – that is, whoever succeeds the lame duck regime of Bashar al-Assad – will need to lean on oil transit fees for revenues, as the government of the 50s and 60s did with the IPC pipeline from Iraq to Syria’s Mediterranean coast. In this sense, once Assad goes he will leave his country’s energy sector in much the same situation his father found it in when he rose to power in 1971.

A role as a center of oil and gas transit, rather than production, presents the best future scenario for the Syrian energy sector. But even after the end of the crisis shaking Syria today, this transformation will prove much easier said than done. Continue reading →

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Posted in Middle East, Syria, Uncategorized

The Search for Golden Opportunities in the Land of Gold

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Akua Appiah-Akuramaa| Leave a comment

(first in a series of blogs bringing the voice of people in or affected by the oil industry all over the world - ed)

As a little girl I loved flying and always thought I’d be an Airhostess so I could spend as much time flying as possible. Later my passion was shifted to Pharmacy after spending some time with my mother in her drug store. As I grew older I realized my favorite subject was Mathematics thus I should look for a new passion that wouldn’t cause me to say goodbye to Math.

Finally I decided on Geological Engineering since the prerequisites were studying Mathematics Physics and Chemistry which I had and it offered me the chance of a career in the outdoors not tied to an office all day. Another major influencing factor for choosing this course was getting into the mineral exploration industry. I always wondered why Ghana as a country producing quite an amount of gold did not have much in its coffers to show for it. Half way into my studies I decided it would be even more worthwhile to specialize in Petroleum Geology because I had seen very few Ghanaians owning gold but every Ghanaian was affected by fuel prices.

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Posted in Africa, Ghana

Who cares about oil?

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Zara Rahman| 3 Comments

What will it take to get Libyans talking about their oil industry? As in detail, numbers and mechanisms, not just salon gossip and personal slander.

At the end of the Paving the Future Youth Forum, held in Tripoli last week by the British Council, the participants were asked to organise themselves into groups, according to the issues which most concerned them about Libya’s future. There were the usual suspects- civil society, women’s empowerment, education, health…. but the table on oil issues, labelled, perhaps unfortunately, “dependency on oil”, was empty.

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Posted in Libya, Middle East, Oil 101, Zara's Libya blogs

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How treehuggers can help hard-nosed businessmen

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Johnny W| Leave a comment

Having spent the last 10 days in Libya, I’ve been searching, as I always seem to end up doing on field trips, for arguments to support the idea of publish and be damned. That governments should just let it all hang out, publish contracts, seismic data, the transactions of state-owned bank accounts, why not, as something which is logistically easy, would revolutionise the way business is done and which would, in both the long and short run, be in the national commercial and political interest.

This usually involves noble arguments, grand philosophy or at best scrabbling around for precedent, often from arcane literature about far flung places that our local partners in any case feel no connection to. Often its too boring and pedagogical, gets in the way of building real trust.

But this visit my friend, a Turkish businessman who works in construction across the Middle East, handed me a case on a platter. Mehmet, or at least that’s what we’ll call him, is a veteran of Middle East business. I often think I detect a note of wry amusement when we exchange stories about who we’ve been meeting and what we’re about. When I introduced the word “treehugger” to him, he repeated it several times, with relish, rolling it around his mouth as it if were a fine Burgundy. Treehuggers, treehuggers. Tree. Huggers. You’re treehuggers?

But he wondered idly last week whether in all our rooting around for data on the Libyan oil industry, we could get well data for him. How many wells there are, what their ages are, how deep they are, how much drilling there’s been recently. This is all information which, if you wanted to know it about the North Sea, is available on a UK government website.

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Posted in Heritage, Libya, Middle East