Egyptian oil – looking through the rumour mill
On first appearances, the fact that there appears to be abundant information about Egypt’s oil and gas sector would seem like a sign of transparency, a well managed information dissemination system allowing citizens to know what is going on with their extractive industries. Under more scrutiny, however, it reveals the opposite. The information available contains more »
Invitation to an open discussion in Cairo, Sunday, April 7th
This Sunday, April 7th in Cairo, OpenOil invites all journalists and activists working on the extractive industries in Egypt to an open discussion: “Civil Society & the Egyptian Oil & Gas industry – how can we drive Transparency in the Digital Age?”
Introducing the Arabic language Libya wikiguide!
We’re happy to announce we have a new addition to our Wiki Guides family – an Arabic language translation of the Libya Oil Almanac. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first Arabic language guide to the Libyan oil industry, and it joins our other Arabic language wiki for Iraq, also the first more »
Best practice as defined in Libya’s oil contracts
In case you were worried about best practice being followed in the oil industry around the world, we’ve been reviewing Libya’s contracts for some research and came across this, embedded in the main EPSA IV agreements between the Libyan state and all the major oil companies of the world. 1.33 Good Oilfield Practices means those practices, more »
Petroleum Development Opportunities in Libya after the Arab Spring
Blog contributed by Jay Park, a partner at Norton Rose, and a contributing author of “Oil Contracts- How to read and understand them”. The echoes of the Arab Spring still resound in Libya. At an oil conference I attended in Tripoli in late September, Libyan speakers began their presentations by honouring those who had been involved more »
Syria’s transit future: all pipelines lead to Damascus?
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 more »
Who cares about oil?
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 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 »
Iraq’s EITI report shows discrepancies with a KPMG audit
We were running some numbers on Iraq’s first EITI report, published in December, and stumbled on a surprising fact: the reconciliation report carried out by Price Waterhouse Cooper, mapped exactly onto an audit by KPMG of the Development Fund for Iraq accounts held in New York. And yet there is a discrepancy of at least more »
The missing pieces in Iraq’s first EITI report
The next few months are an incredibly crucial time for Iraq as an implementing country of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). It has until August 2012 to achieve EITI Validation, following the beginning of its candidacy in February 2010. As such, any issues with regards to the activities designed to display their increase in more »
Colombia, KRG, Peru: so where are those “published” Oil Contracts?
There is an ever increasing level of interest in the debate around contract transparency in the global extractives industries, and a growing minority of jurisdictions which have agreed to publish contracts openly. However winning the argument is only the first chapter in the story as I discovered recently looking at Colombia, Peru and Iraqi Kudistan. 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 »
Iran sanctions risk widening rift between the West and India & China
In the maelstrom of debate around Western oil sanctions on Iran, the impact on the two Asian giants, India and China, has inevitably figured. Commentators have pointed out that Asian markets are likely, in fact, to be the biggest beneficiaries of the EU’s decision this week to impose oil sanctions after July 1 and similar more »
Iraq’s first EITI report raises as many questions as it answers
Iraq issued its first report under the EITI mechanism just before the New Year and it was circulated last week in English, Arabic and Kurdish. It’s the first formal deliverable in Iraq’s participation in the transparency scheme since it signed up two years ago. Price Waterhouse Cooper reconciled financial reporting from Iraq’s monopoly oil marketing more »
Iraq’s uncertain oil future – ExxonMobil as harbinger
Sitting in Baghdad airport last week as the last American troops left was a filmic experience. Soldiers rattled around on the tarmac with their kit bags while Apaches hovered overhead – thrump, thrump, thrump. The airport base, even last year, home to perhaps 40,000 men, was almost empty and the Iraqi army hovered round the more »
