Energy, Mining & Utilities

Energy poverty – the lack of access to basic electricity and fuel – became a fashionable topic after the term was coined in the 1990s. So, when Universidad Pontificia Comillas, a university in Madrid, Spain, launched a Department of Energy and Poverty in 2018, it was seen as a bold initiative.  Read More

A vast tree planting project in the Batéké plateau of the Republic of the Congo, near the border with Gabon, funded by fossil fuel company TotalEnergies to offset company greenhouse gas emissions, has displaced local communities from using their traditional lands. Read More

When Hurricane Fiona, a Category One storm, hit Puerto Rico last September, all three million people on the island were plunged into darkness. Members of the U.S. Congress questioned why LUMA Energy, the company that was awarded the power system management contract in 2020, was unable to cope. Read More

In the 1920s the city of Los Angeles produced a quarter of the world’s oil supply. A century later, the city council voted 12-0 to ban new oil and gas extraction and shut down existing operations, dealing a major defeat to companies like Freeport McMoRan which still operate dozens of wells inside the city. Read More

Permian Proud, a recently launched news website, may seem like any other local newspaper at first glance, providing stories on the people of western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. A closer look, however, shows that the site is a propaganda machine intended to improve fossil fuel giant Chevron’s image. Read More

For almost 30 years, oil and gas giant Santos has sponsored the annual multicultural arts festival in Darwin, Northern Territory. After a group of artists, First Nations representatives and philanthropists offered A$200,000 for the festival to cancel the sponsorship in 2023, the company agreed to withdraw.  Read More

In 2008, Radiant Lagoon Sdn Bhd was granted two palm oil concessions covering an area of 4,400 hectares (10,900 acres) adjacent to Gunung Mulu National Park, the only UNESCO World Heritage site in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. In 2018, the company began logging the area without obtaining required permits. Read More

Aqua America, a subsidiary of Essential Utilities of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, made an unsolicited $1.1 billion bid in 2020 to buy the sewage system of Bucks County in Pennsylvania. The deal would have been the largest sewage privatization deal in U.S. history. Residents of the county stopped the deal from happening, with the help of grassroots organizations and local county officials. Read More

ArcelorMittal, the steel giant, has promised to invest $1 billion to upgrade its mining and metallurgical complex in Temirtau, Kazakhstan, where dozens of workers have died in industrial accidents in recent years and the pollution is so bad that winter snow sometimes turns black. Read More

Shell was given a permit to explore for oil off the Wild Coast in the Eastern Cape province, South Africa in 2014. The permit was extended in 2021 by the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Affairs. In September 2022, the High Court in the city of Makhanda in the Eastern Cape ruled that the exploration permit was illegal. Read More