Energy, Mining & Utilities

Bolivia has been ordered to pay $41 million to Rurelec, a UK energy company, in compensation for nationalizing the Guaracachi power plant in May 2010. The order represents a small profit for Rurelec which bought a 50.1 percent stake in 2006 but substantially less than what the company demanded. Read More

Shell's plans to drill for oil in the Arctic's Chukchi Sea have been handed a major setback by a U.S appeals court which ruled that the Department of the Interior had underestimated the potential environment impact. The courts ordered the federal government to do a new assessment. Read More

Two climate activists who staged a protest at the headquarters of Devon Energy, a Fortune 500 company based in Oklahoma city, have been charged with a "terrorism hoax" after black powder drifted down from a banner that they unfurled. Read More

This past Christmas, while children around the world wrote letters to Santa Claus whom they believed would deliver presents to them in a sleigh drawn by the mythical Rudolph, the actual human companions of the Arctic reindeer spent their holidays worrying about Beowulf, a British mining company. Read More

A lawsuit against Victor Dahdaleh, a Canadian-British billionaire, for allegedly paying £39 million ($65 million) in bribes to win supply contracts worth £2 billion ($3.2 billion) from Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) has collapsed. Read More

Sierra Leone police opened fire on a group of protestors who were demonstrating against a palm oil plantation in the southern province of Pujehun. The project is being developed by Societe Financiere des Caoutchoucs (Socfin), a French agri-business giant. Read More

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

BSGR, an Israeli mining conglomerate, is under investigation for the acquisition of mining rights to the Simandou iron ore deposit in Guinea, said to be the biggest in the world. Read More

ArcelorMittal, the global steel giant, has been ordered to hand over documents about the environmental impact of two South African facilities to community activists. The Luxembourg-based company, the largest steel producer in Africa, has been accused of polluting the air and water as well as dumping hazardous waste. Read More

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is facing calls to be shut down for failing to properly manage the environmental catastrophe caused by the meltdown of three of the company's nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan. The disaster was the result of a tsunami triggered by a March 2011 earthquake. Read More