| Scramble for Africa - The Guardian
Washington's determination to find an alternative energy source to the Middle East is leading to a new oil rush in sub-Saharan Africa which threatens to launch a fresh cycle of conflict, corruption and environmental degradation in the region, campaigners warn today.
The new scramble for Africa risks bringing more misery to the continent's impoverished citizens as western oil companies pour billions of dollars in secret payments into government coffers throughout the continent. Much of the money ends up in the hands of ruling elites or is squandered on grandiose projects and the military.
Tony Blair will today urge the oil industry to be more transparent in its dealings with Africa. Openness and accountability are essentials for stability and prosperity in the developing world, he will tell oil company executives and oil exporting countries at a meeting in Lancaster House in central London.
African countries own 8% of world oil reserves. An estimated $200bn (£125bn) in revenues will flow into African government treasuries over the next 10 years as new oilfields open up throughout the Gulf of Guinea. Oil will bring the largest influx of revenue in the continent's history, and more than 10 times the amount western donors give each year in aid.
But Ian Gary, author of a new report, Bottom of the Barrel, from the US aid agency Catholic Relief Services (CRS), warned yesterday: "Petro-dollars have not helped developing countries to reduce poverty; in many cases they have actually exacerbated it. In Nigeria, for example, which has received over $300bn in oil revenues over the last 25 years, per capita income is less than a $1 a day."
Despite the prime minister's backing for the extractive industries transparency initiative (EITI), aid agencies and MEPs say Britain has let oil companies off the hook by watering down plans to make publication of payments to third world governments mandatory.
"The purely voluntary approach will not work in the countries where it is most needed because many political and business elites have major vested interests in avoiding transparency," said Simon Taylor, director of Global Witness, which works to expose links between natural resource exploitation and human rights abuses.
British oil firms, including Shell and BP, have privately backed calls for publication of payments to be compulsory because they believe otherwise honest companies will be undercut by less scrupulous competitors.
BP was nearly kicked out of Angola for disclosing that it had paid a $111m signature bonus to the government in 2001.
But with the US administration under pressure from American oil companies to resist new regulations, Britain has abandoned the mandatory approach in favour of a statement of principles which industry and government representative can agree on.
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| Pipeline's Profits May Bypass Africans - Los Angeles Times
Skinny children play in front of mud huts, cars kick up clouds of dust on dirt roads and open pits serve as the sewage system in this isolated tropical town. In the jungle nearby, construction crews work in the burning sun, laying
5,000 -pound links of pipeline.
By year's end, hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude will be coursing from oil fields in neighboring Chad, through rain forests in Cameroon and into tankers docked off the Atlantic coast.
The government of Cameroon will collect about $500 million over three decades for allowing the pipeline to cross its territory. Chad, which owns the oil, will receive at least $2.5 billion.
But with construction nearly finished, promises made about the pipeline's economic and social benefits appear overblown. Doubts are growing that needy places such as Nanga Eboko will see any lasting gain.
When construction began three years ago, the participating oil companies, the World Bank and the U.S. government all said the project would set a new standard for Third World energy projects, which historically have enriched corrupt rulers and multinational companies while often deepening poverty.
The oil consortium, led by ExxonMobil Corp., and its backers said the $3.7-billion, 670-mile pipeline would provide jobs, improve health care and raise living standards in the impoverished countries. If successful, the project would also smooth the way for increased oil exports from Africa, key to the Bush administration's strategy for reducing U.S. energy dependence on the Middle East.
As promised, the pipeline created thousands of jobs — but the vast majority turned out to be temporary. The World Bank says about 400 Chadians will have full-time jobs with the consortium, most in low-paying positions such as drivers and security guards. In Cameroon, the bank says, the number of permanent jobs will be "negligible," probably about 100.
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| Iraqi oil industry: among the biggest booty of war - Gulf News
As the dust of war settles over Iraq, the much touted rebuilding of Iraq is, at least on paper, being filtered down in the form of contracts.
While discussions between European partners and the UN were going on prior to the war on the possible rebuilding contracts for Iraq, the unilateral action by the U.S. and Britain in invading Iraq, without UN support, threw all discussions at the UN level out of the window.
Clearly, the U.S. deemed it their sole prerogative to be responsible for the rebuilding of Iraq, and though the UN lifting sanctions might have theoretically promised a fair share of the pie to all, this is not likely to be the case.
Even its erstwhile ally, Britain, might be a little miffed at the way the chunk of the current business emanating from Iraq has gone to U.S. companies, with some British companies at best becoming their subcontractors.
At the end of the Gulf war in 1991, there was deep resentment within British companies as the majority of the Kuwait contracts went to U.S. companies, as indeed now is the case with Iraq.
Of the 61 British companies that picked up tender documents for various large contracts in Iraq, not one company won a decent size tender.
The main winner of the Iraq contracts has been Bechtel with $680 million awarded in one single contract alone.
Companies like Halliburton, Flour, Louis Berger Group and the Parsons Corp, all American firms, are not far behind in the collection of contracts from Iraq.
It is not surprising that each of these companies has close ties to the Republican Party in the U.S. Bechtel's board members have included George Schultz and Casper Weinberger, and former CIA chief, William Casey, a close friend of the Bush family, was also an employee of the company.
Halliburton has very close ties to U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney who headed the company until he decided to run for the post of vice-president on the same ticket as President George W. Bush.(...) One of the biggest booties of this war has been the Iraqi oil industry.
Indeed, when people say this war was about oil, they are dead wrong, as oil has a referenced price and cannot be stolen.
This war was about the rebuilding of the Iraqi oil industry — that is where the money is and the least obvious.
For two decades U.S. companies have been deprived of any oil industry contracts, and, on the other hand, Iraq has not been able to maintain the oil installations during the period of sanctions.
This is where the chunk of the money is to be made as Iraq is geared up to bring its production capacity back to 6 million barrels of oil a day.
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| Netanyahu Says Iraq-Israel Oil Line No Pipe-Dream - Reuters
Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he expected an oil pipeline from Iraq to Israel to be reopened in the near future after being closed when Israel became a state in 1948.
"It won't be long when you will see Iraqi oil flowing to Haifa," the port city in northern Israel, Netanyahu told a group of British investors, declining to give a timetable.
"It is just a matter of time until the pipeline is reconstituted and Iraqi oil will flow to the Mediterranean."
Netanyahu later told Reuters the government was in the early stages of looking into the possibility of reopening the pipeline, which during the British Mandate sent oil from Mosul to Haifa via Jordan.
"It's not a pipe-dream," Netanyahu said. In April, a source at the National Infrastructure Ministry told Reuters Israel and Jordan would hold talks on reopening the pipeline, which Israel believes would lower fuel costs by 25 percent.
The source said that the Israeli section of the pipeline was in good condition but did not know about the Jordanian section.
Jordanian officials denied they would meet Israeli officials, citing cold relations with the Jewish state since the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising in late 2000.
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US oil giant faces court battle over Burma violations - Independent
One of America's most powerful oil conglomerates looks likely to get its comeuppance in court over its overseas business practices after spreading a trail of misery through a small rainforest village in the Tenasserim region of Burma in November 1994.
When the Union Oil Company of California, or Unocal, started working on a gas pipeline project there, it con-tracted out security operations to the Burmese military regime; and that was when the horror began.
According to court documents, Burmese soldiers entered a house in the village, broke into the rice storeroom with an axe, kicked the woman of the house and pushed her down some stairs. After a brief hunt for her husband, the soldiers came back and kicked the woman again, knocking her unconscious and pushing her into a lighted fireplace. They kicked her infant daughter into the fire too.
The soldiers wanted the family to relocate to another village to make way for the pipeline, and they weren't about to take "no" for an answer. The baby desperately needed medical care, but the soldiers forced the family to stay in a field without water for two days as they ransacked their belongings. By the time the family had paid off the soldiers, by selling a cow, it was too late. The baby died from an infected head wound.
The human rights organisations that have brought a suit against Unocal allege that the Yadana pipeline project has led to dozens of similar incidents, as well as rape and extortion. They say villagers - who are left unnamed in the suit for their own protection - have been systematically relocated and pressed into forced labour.
Invoking an old United States law - the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, which was passed to combat piracy on the high seas but has now been adapted to confront other infractions of the "laws of nations" - they argue that Unocal and other companies must be held accountable for violations committed overseas in their name. And they are now just one step away from forcing the issue into open court. A panel of federal appeals judges in San Francisco heard final arguments this week on whether Unocal should be made to stand trial. Although a ruling is not expected for a few weeks, early indications are that a trial will indeed take place, setting a new legal precedent for US corporations and heralding the possibility of new standards of corporate behaviour in some of the most benighted corners of the world.
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| Short Supply of Natural Gas Raises Economic Worries - New York Times
The economy has been cool, and so has the spring in much of the country. Nonetheless, the United States is facing its most severe shortage of natural gas in a quarter-century.
Industries like fertilizer and ammonia makers, which use gas to produce their goods, are already laying off workers. And experts warn that a warming trend, in the economy or the weather, could send prices spiking for the electricity that cools homes and runs every sort of business.
"You would have thought that the last big upsurge in prices a couple of years ago was a tremendous wake-up call," said Gwyn Morgan, chief executive of EnCana, a Canadian company that is the largest independent natural gas producer and storage operator in North America. "But for most people it was not."
The market manipulation by companies like Enron has been blamed for much of the price surge of 2000 and 2001, which led to brownouts in parts of California and price spikes for electricity in much of the West and some of the Northeast. But now, like then, most analysts agree, the basic law of supply and demand is at work.
With natural gas promoted as a cleaner-burning fuel than oil or coal, nearly all the electric plants built since 1998 are designed to be fired mainly by gas. So demand is up. And while drilling has increased about 25 percent in the last year, much of it has been confined to old, overworked basins that are not as productive as they once were. Supplies, therefore, have not kept up.
In addition, analysts say that a failure to gauge supply needs and weather patterns accurately in an up-and-down economy has added to the squeeze on supplies.
Prices for natural gas have risen sharply in the last year, reaching a peak at more than $6 per million British thermal units, compared with about $3.65 a year earlier. Stored supplies of natural gas have fallen to the lowest level since the federal government began keeping records in 1976, with levels about 30 percent below the average for the last five years.
The effects of this latest surge in prices have led to renewed calls from the gas industry for the loosening of environmental restrictions on drilling and pipeline construction in the United States. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and the National Petroleum Council are convening a top-level meeting later this month to discuss the shortage and propose solutions.
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