Energy, Mining & Utilities

Federal commodity-trading regulators on Wednesday announced that a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell PLC has agreed to pay a $200,000 penalty to settle charges of making ''fictitious'' trades of crude oil futures contracts.The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Shell International Trading and Shipping Co. of London engaged in prearranged ''noncompetitive'' trades on the New York Mercantile Exchange with a U.S.-based Shell subsidiary, Shell Trading US Co., on five occasions between November 2003 and March 2004. Read More

A former executive at energy company Dynegy Inc. whose 24-year prison sentence for accounting fraud was thrown out by a federal appeals panel should serve no more than five years, his attorney said in court papers. Read More

The plea bargain last week by former Enron Chief Accounting Officer Richard Causey gives federal prosecutors the chance to present a shorter and less technical case against former company Chairman Kenneth Lay and former President Jeffrey Skilling. The pair's trial on conspiracy, fraud and other charges is scheduled to start in Houston on Jan. 30. Read More

When the levees that protected Chalmette gave way to Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29, about 1,800 homes were inundated with floodwaters carrying nearly 1.1 million gallons of oil from a nearby refinery. Read More

For months a pitched battle has been fought between communities that claim authority over this village and the right to control what lies beneath its watery ground: a potentially vast field of crude oil that has caught the attention of a major energy company. Read More

The corruption-prone country expects oil revenues to total $160 billion by 2025. Read More

Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian who grew up in childhood poverty, has won the Bolivian presidential elections. He is part of a wave of leftists taking power in Latin America and challenging multinational corporations. Read More

The former chief accounting officer of Enron pleaded guilty today to a single felony charge of securities fraud and agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors, giving a significant lift to the government's case against the two leading figures in the scandal over Enron's collapse. Read More

One of the paradoxes of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change is that companies in Russia and other Eastern European countries, which are among the world's largest producers of greenhouse gases, are poised to earn hundreds of millions of dollars through trading their rights to release carbon dioxide into the air. Read More

Months of investigation by The New York Times revealed a level of contacts and financial support to the military not fully disclosed by Freeport, despite years of requests by shareholders concerned about potential violations of American laws and the company's relations with a military whose human rights record is so blighted that the United States severed ties for a dozen years until November. Read More