Energy, Mining & Utilities

ESCRAVOS, Nigeria -- Hundreds of women carrying straw mats and thermoses abandoned ChevronTexaco's main oil terminal, ending a peaceful 10-day protest that crippled the oil giant's Nigeria operations and won an unprecedented company pledge to build modern towns out of poor villages. Read More

Women protesters who have besieged an oil terminal in southern Nigeria for more than a week say they will continue their blockade. Read More

FENCELINE: A COMPANY TOWN DIVIDED premieres nationally on P.O.V. Tuesday, July 23, 2002 at 10:00 pm (check local listings) on PBS. Produced by LOGTV, Ltd. in association with the Independent Television Service. ITVS and National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) Co-presentation. Read More

Oil company executives thumped the table and even offered concessions, but the women who took over a giant oil terminal and trapped hundreds of workers inside did not budge Saturday in their demands for jobs for their sons and electricity for their homes. Read More

Groups hailed Tuesday a sweeping and unprecedented ruling by Africa's premier human rights tribunal that held that the former military regime of Nigeria violated the economic and social rights of the Ogoni people by failing to protect their property, lands, and health from destruction caused by foreign oil companies and the Nigerian security forces. Read More

April's big business-led coup in Venezuela failed, where international finance's coup in Argentina in recent months has succeeded. Greg Palast gives us the inside track on two very different power-grabs. Read More

Not everybody is convinced that Turkmenistan will be the source of a future pipeline in Central Asia. Joseph Naemi, another Iranian born businessmen who splits his time between Sydney, Australia, and Tashkent, Uzbekistan, is working on the possibility that Afghanistan's other major northern neighbor may be a better business bet Read More

Sixty-four mainly European nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from some 37 countries are asking international financial institutions (IFIs), like the World Bank, and bilateral export credit agencies (ECAs), including the United States Export-Import Bank, to deny funding for a multi-billion-dollar oil pipeline project to run more than 1,000 miles from the Caspian Sea to Ceyhan, a Turkish port on the Mediterranean. Read More

The Environmental Protection Agency will relax air pollution rules to make it easier for utilities to upgrade and expand their coal-burning power plants, Bush administration sources said yesterday. Read More

A lawsuit claiming US energy giant UNOCAL was complicit in human rights abuses committed by Myanmar's military regime will go ahead in California in September, lawyers said. Read More