Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Russia revokes environmental permit for Sakhalin-2 project
China Peoples Daily
Russia’s Natural Resource Ministry decided on Monday to revoke the environmental approval of Sakhalin-2, a massive energy project in the Far East led by British-Dutch group Shell.
The ministry said in a statement that it considered a protest filed by First Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Buksman against a ministry decree giving environmental approval for the project and decided to annul the decree, the Interfax news agency reported.
The move came after complaints from prosecutors who said the state environmental study was based on insufficient documents. The project also lacked a risk evaluation for the construction of isothermic reservoirs and the evaluation of seismic and tectonic danger was insufficient, they said. ..
(19 Sept 2006)
See the New York Times if you need convincing that the Russian government is mad and bad, or start with maybe ISN if you prefer to make your own mind up. –LJ
Iran and Venezuela plan Syrian refinery
Al Jazeera
Venezuela and Iran are planning to construct a petroleum refinery in Syria capable of processing 150,000 barrels a day, Venezuela’s oil minister has said.
‘We’re studying [planning] an oil refinery in Syria,”said Rafael Ramirez, during an official visit to Venezuela by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, on Monday. ..
Ahmadinejad’s first trip to Venezuela also highlighted Iran’s backing for the fellow OPEC country’s bid for a UN security council seat that Chavez would use to challenge Washington’s campaign for international sanctions against Tehran. ..
Petroleos de Venezuela SA, Venezuela’s state-run oil company, has recently bought a stake in a small Argentine refinery, signed a deal to double capacity at a Uruguayan refinery, revamped a Cuban refinery and laid the cornerstone for a $2.5 billion refinery in Brazil last December.
(19 Sept 2006)
Russia aims at 10 mil. tons of oil exports to China by rail in 2006
Kyodo/Yahoo
Russia hopes to ship 10 million tons of oil to China by rail in 2006, up 25 percent from the 8 million tons recorded in 2005, visiting Russian Transport Minister Igor Levintin said Friday.
“In the first seven months of the year, the shipments of oil totalled 6 million tons,” Levintin told reporters at a Beijing hotel. “We hope that this year it will reach 10 million tons.”
Russia’s shipments of oil have increased in recent years, reflecting Russia’s keenness to export its natural resources and China’s growing demand for them to fuel its economy.
Levintin said the total of shipments of goods between Russia and China totalled 30 million tons in 2005, up 23 percent from 2004.
(15 Sept 2006)
Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa
Michael Watts, Monthly Review
…Although Africa is not as well endowed in hydrocarbons (both oil and gas) as the Gulf states, the continent “is all set to balance power,” and as a consequence it is “the subject of fierce competition by energy companies.” IHS Energy-one of the oil industry’s major consulting companies-expects African oil production, especially along the Atlantic littoral, to attract “huge exploration investment” contributing over 30 percent of world liquid hydrocarbon production by 2010. Over the last five years when new oilfield discoveries were scarce, one in every four barrels of new petroleum discovered outside of Northern America was found in Africa. A new scramble is in the making. The battleground consists of the rich African oilfields (see map).
Energy security is the name of the game. No surprise, then, that the Council on Foreign Relations’s call for a different U.S. approach to Africa in its new report, More than Humanitarianism (2005), turns on Africa’s “growing strategic importance” for U.S. policy. It is the West African Gulf of Guinea, encompassing the rich on- and offshore fields stretching from Nigeria to Angola, that represents a key plank in Bush’s alternative to the increasingly volatile and unpredictable oil-states of the Persian Gulf. Nigeria and Angola alone account for nearly four million barrels per day (almost half of Africa’s output)
…The oil complex is a sort of corporate enclave economy but also a center of political and economic calculation that can only be understood through the operation of a set of local, national, and transnational forces that can be dubbed as “imperial oil.” The struggle for resource control that has taken center stage over the last decade in Nigeria as the Niger Delta has become more ungovernable (because the struggle has assumed a more militant cast) grows precisely from this mix of forces that constitute the oil complex.
Michael Watts directs the Center for African Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
(Sep 2006 issue)
In-depth analysis from the respected Marxist journal. -BA
