Oil and corruption in Uganda: the foreign donors’ plight
If this had been the UN, we might have sent a strongly worded statement to the Norwegians. They were absent from a forum in the heart of Africa on the corrupting effects of oil, an affliction for which Norway, more than any other nation, seemingly knows the cure. It wasn’t the UN – it was more »
Oil and Stability in Azerbaijan: cracks begin to appear.
There are some big decisions to be made by investors in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas sector this year, with up to $30 billion at stake at the Shah Deniz Stage 2 gas development, planned to come on stream in 2018. Statoil is fretting about political uncertainty in the EU. But it and other investors should be more »
A tale of two giants: SOFAZ, SOCAR and the EITI in Azerbaijan
Some time ago I wrote about my initial bewilderment at the Azerbaijani government’s touting of its EITI record, given a personal experience of the country very much at odds with everything that the EITI stands for. Of course, the debate will always come back to the troubles of a broadly successful global mechanism overburdened with high more »
Lost in the pipeline: transparency and the “transit curse”
Bloggers in the world of energy came to accept some time ago that our topic matter, while it might get us hot under the collar, is going to be hard to sell to the wider world as a sexy topic. But judging by the ridicule of my colleagues at the prospect of writing a blog more »
Facing climate change with “peak oil” down
News just in – Big Oil rebutting Peak Oil theory. Is this really news? Well, I think so. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already familiar with the debate. In one corner, we have some environmentalists and Peak Oil-ers, declaring that the world’s oil production has peaked, holding pictures of nice, aesthetically pleasing Hubbert’s Curve, more »
Beirut- a tale of two conferences
Last week, I attended two conferences, both related to the oil industry. The similarities between the two were clear ; both relating to the extractive industries, held in Beirut, a focus on the MENA region, but the differences were astounding and revealed a huge amount to me about potential pitfalls in the campaign for good more »
Uganda seeks a refined place in the oil world
The other day in Kampala my boda-boda swerved around a truck headed west on a highway in the city’s outskirts. The trailer had PETROLEUM FOR EXPORT stenciled in faded letters on its side. As we shot past the big transporter barreling down the road, I wondered – Uganda isn’t producing oil yet. What is it doing exporting… more »
Upstream Petroleum Contracts: Where the “Rubber Hits the Road” in a Petroleum Regime
Blog contributed by Jay Park, a partner with Norton Rose, who will be one of the ‘sprinters’ in our booksprint initiative to write “How to Read and Understand Oil Contracts”. Zara Rahman’s recent blog post described OpenOil’s initiative to do a ‘booksprint’ to write a book about “How to Read and Understand an Oil Contract”. more »
Open Letter: to the EITI companies leading the fight against transparency
To EITI board members Mr Stuart Brooks of Chevron, Mr Alan McLean of Royal Dutch Shell, Ms Elodie Grant Goodey of BP, Mr Guillermo Garcia of ExxonMobil, and Ms Baiba Rubesa of Statoil ASA: Each of your companies is a member of the American Petroleum Institute (API), which last week filed a lawsuit against the more »
‘Cite du Petrole’: A Rare Snapshot of Big Oil’s Glory Days
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 more »
How treehuggers can help hard-nosed businessmen
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 more »
Why doesn’t the oil industry talk to itself more?
Why doesn’t the oil industry talk more to itself? Or, to be more precise, oil industries, since while of course it’s one global market when it comes to buying and selling, and the flutter of a butterfly’s wing in the North Sea can send Singapore futures soaring, it looks a bit different and slightly more more »
Breaking the mould in the oil industry
If you were to believe the CEOs of Big Oil speaking at the World Petroleum Congress in Doha last month, you would think that the oil industry is in great shape. Every one of them emphasised how great the industry was doing; how the industry is in effect doing the world a great service and, more »
When is an oil company not an oil company?
Question: When is an oil company not an oil company? Answer: When it’s a security contractor, a bank, a derivatives trader or manipulator of stock market value… The news this week that Heritage Oil was quietly advertising itself to those in the know as advisers to the new Libyan government, beginning with the advice that more »
