Construction & Megaprojects

YPF, the Argentinian state-owned oil company, has signed an agreement with Chevron in the U.S. to extract shale gas and oil using fracking technology in the southern Andes mountains. Local environmental and indigenous activists are gearing up for a fight to stop the controversial technology. Read More

Honduran owned Generadora del Istmo S.A. (GENISA) is almost done with building Barro Blanco- a 28.84 megawatt hydroelectric project - on the Tabasará river in Chiriqui province in western Panama. The indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé community says that the impact of this project on their livelihoods will be devastating. Read More

TransCanada and the provincial government of Alberta are paying former advisors to the Obama administration - as well as former staff of the Hillary Clinton and John Kerry presidential campaigns - to help them lobby for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to transport tar sands fuel to the U.S. Read More

Executives from three major Spanish construction companies are in the limelight for allegedly contributing to a slush fund for the Partido Popular, the Spanish ruling party: Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas from Barcelona, Obrascón Huarte Lain and Sacyr Vallehermoso from Madrid. The scandal has rocked the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy. Read More

A climate change activist locked himself to a projector screen at an oil and gas conference in Texas today interrupting a TransCanada executive who was making a presentation on a pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Instead 300 astonished attendees heard an impassioned presentation about TransCanada's poor safety record. Read More

Well over a year after AES Corporation, a U.S. based power company headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, inundated the lands of the Ngäbe to build a hydroelectric dam in Panama, many in the community remains dispossessed. Read More

A mysterious fire and a missing activist have contributed to the concerns of Russian activists fighting a new highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The highway is being built by a consortium that involves Vinci, a French construction multinational, and individuals rumored to be close to prime minister Vladimir Putin. Read More

Two controversial multinational projects in Orissa, an eastern Indian state, face high level decisions in the next few weeks: a bauxite mine in the Niyamgiri hills planned by Vedanta of the UK and an iron and steel refinery in Jagatsinghpur being developed by POSCO of South Korea. Read More

TransCanada is seeking permission to build a 1,661-mile-long oil pipeline to carry crude from Alberta's oil sands to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. Tribal leaders from both sides of the border have joined environmental activists to oppose the project. Read More

A U.S.-based company is planning a system of elevated highways in Chennai, India, that will despoil natural resources that humans and wildlife have shared for millennia, environmentalists and villagers claim. Wilbur Smith Associates has won approval for the projects, they further charge, through deceptive practices and corporate sleight of hand. Read More