Energy, Mining & Utilities

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

The idyllic village of Balcombe, just south of London, is a stronghold of the Conservative party. Just the sort of place that one might imagine cheering on industry plans to drill for natural gas and applaud the tax breaks that the government has offered to industry. 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

A subsidiary of Arch Coal of St. Louis, Missouri, was denied permission to dump nearly three billion cubic feet of dirt into local headwater streams after blowing up a mountain in West Virginia. The object was to extract coal from a project known as the Spruce No. 1 Surface Mine. Read More

Alstom, a French engineering company, has been accused of bribing Indonesian officials to win a lucrative contract to build coal power plans in Sumatra. Frederic Pierucci, a French employee of the company, was arrested and David Rothschild, a U.S. employee, has pled guilty. Read More

A lawsuit against HudBay Minerals in Canada for human rights abuses in Guatemala is the next case to watch for corporate accountability activists after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a case against Shell for aiding and abetting human rights abuses in Nigeria. Read More

In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit against Shell in Nigeria for human rights abuses in the Ogoni region. The ruling effectively blocks other lawsuits against foreign multinationals for human rights abuse that have occurred overseas from being brought in U.S. courts. Read More

For over a month, villagers in the eastern Indian state of Odisha have been conducting a sit-in to demand the withdrawal of armed police officers at the site of a proposed $12 billion steel complex to be built by Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) of South Korea. Read More

BP, the UK oil company, went on trial this week for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. The company could be fined up to $30 billion over the $25 billion it has promised if the court finds that it was "grossly negligent." 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