Energy, Mining & Utilities

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday ordered to the Atlantic Richfield Company, ARCO, to begin an investigation to determine the nature and extent of contamination at the Anaconda Copper Mine in Yerington, Nevada. Read More

Only days away from the end of the United Nations' Year of Deserts and Desertification, four experts discuss the challenges of translating a decade's worth of research about the degradation of land in arid areas of the world. Phuong Tran reports from VOA's Dakar bureau, located in the arid Saharan region of West Africa. Read More

ECUADOR: Ecuador's attorney general has asked U.S. officials to investigate Chevron Corp's alleged "fraud and deceit" connected with oil-field contamination in the Amazon rain forest, the latest salvo in a long-running legal dispute. Read More

A US court has almost halved the damages oil giant Exxon Mobil must pay for a 1989 oil spill off Alaska. Read More

In the woods at the fringe of this Western Maryland town, a mountain of waste 50 feet high is slouching into a creek that's tinted an eerie orange. The "gob pile" is refuse from a long-abandoned coal mine. And the stream into which it's eroding, Winebrenner Run, is devoid of life - one of the state's worst cases of sulfuric acid pollution from mines. Read More

While Iraq represents bloodshed and death on a massive scale to most people, to Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) it has brought a boom time, boosting the revenues of British-based PMSCs alone from £320 million in 2003 to more than £1.8 billion in 2004. In the same year income for the industry worldwide reached $100 billion. Read More

On Oct. 24, after a 14-day occupation, representatives of the Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes Rio (FECONACO), which includes the Quichua and Urarinas people, reached an agreement with PlusPetrol and the Peruvian government. The agreement gave them 98 percent of their demands. Read More

Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling was sentenced today to 24 years in prison for his role in the energy company's 2001 collapse in what has become one of the nation's biggest corporate scandals. Read More

The Ford Motor Company is misleading the public and the government about several of its vehicles that claim to operate on ethanol, according to letters sent to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by the watchdog group Public Citizen. Read More

As many as 80,000 families living near the Jharia mine in Dhanbad coal belt face relocation. Officials say the coalfield area is, in effect, sitting on a "giant fireball deep inside the earth," after they discovered at least six underground leaks of toxic fumes. Experts fear massive underground explosions followed by subsidence occuring at any moment. Read More