Cancer Alley: Chevron profile

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Chevron is a fossil fuel company headquartered in San Ramon, California. It was founded in the 1870s as the Standard Oil Company of California and later acquired the assets of Texaco, another Standard Oil company. In 2011, courts in Ecuador ruled that the company should pay $9.5 billion for dumping an estimated 16 billion gallons of toxic waste and abandoning 1,000 waste pits at Texaco's Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador's Amazon, after Indigenous communities like the Cofán and the Shuar sued the company. Not only has the company has refused to pay up, it has aggressively pursued the activists who supported the lawsuit, like Steven Donziger, one of the main lawyers on the case. Chevron has also been accused of serious environmental and human rights abuse in the Niger Delta, notably for financing the mobile police, also known as the “kill and go” squad, who shot and killed two Ilaje ethnic protestors during an occupation of Chevron’s Parabe platform in 1998.

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A 2021 report on the company uncovered 70 ongoing lawsuits against Chevron in 31 countries around the world, with 16 in Nigeria and 13 in the U.S., with pending claims of $50.5 billion still pending. Most of these cases involve air and water pollution as well as associated human rights abuse like the killing of 12 striking oil workers at Zhanaozen in Kazakhstan in 2011.

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(See the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Enforcement and Compliance History Online for Chevron's plants in Belle Chasse and St. James. Note that auto-display of data from this link may be disabled for some browsers. If so, copy the URL manually into a new browser window to see it.)

Notably in the U.S. Chevron has been heavily criticized for the pollution caused by flaring at the company's oil refinery in Richmond, California. The city sued the company over a 2012 refinery fire that forced thousands of people to seek medical treatment. Although the company paid a settlement of $5 million for the fire, flaring has continued to pollute the community as recently as 2021.

To learn more about Chevron, see the CorpWatch Gulliver profile here. A complete list of CorpWatch's Cancer Alley profiles may be accessed here.