Concerned employees could be joining global campaigners to demand changes from Shell; including an end to daily gas flaring and oil spills in the Niger Delta. Stories in the Financial Times and The Times today revealed that: Contact details for 176,000 employees and contractors of Royal Dutch Shell have been sent to environmental and human…

Nigerian investors attempting to end gas flaring in Nigeria have publicly accused Shell and other international oil companies of obstructing their plans. The Nigerian companies signed a Memo of Understanding with the Nigerian government to divert the gas to domestic power generation in December 2009. The international oil companies continue to flare gas causing a…

Local opposition is slowing Shell’s plans to drill for “tight gas” in Mora County in North-Western Arizona. Until recently, extracting “tight” or “shale gas” wasn’t economically viable, due to the smaller quantities dispersed across a wider rock deposit. However, new techniques known as “hydraulic fracturing” or “fracking” allow oil & gas corporations to access these…

Internationally recognised marine scientist Rick Steiner was forced to resign his position as professor and conservation specialist at the University of Alaska Marine Advisory Program in Anchorage. Prof Steiner has played an important role in recent years in raising concerns over oil company, particularly Shell, operations in Sakhalin, Alaska and Nigeria. Pressure from the oil…

First Nation and environmental groups in Alaska are legally challenging Shell’s permit to drill in the Arctic Chukchi Sea this summer. The Chukchi lies north of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia and is habitat for endangered species including bowhead whales, walrus and polar bears, which play a crucial role in the way of…

Another investigation by Taimour Lay shows the risks of Tullow & Heritage’s oil finds on Lake Albert fueling new fighting between armed forces (armies and militias) in the region. “Heritage Oil, owned by former mercenary fighter Tony Buckingham, had donated speed boats to the FARDC (Congolese national army) in March 2007 and had also been…

Positive news this morning as a Dutch court ruling announced that four Nigerian farmers and Friends of the Earth Netherlands can hold Royal Dutch Shell and Shell Nigeria accountable, a short distance from Shell’s global headquarters in The Hague. For more details please see the press release from Friends of the Earth Netherlands. If found…

As the California Zephyr climbs slowly into the Rockies, my fellow train passengers in the observation carriage stare in silence through the enormous windows, as we pass hundreds of miles of narrow gorges, red rock cliffs and frozen waterfalls. Coyotes run through the snow as the train approaches, while studious bald eagles perched above streams ignore us,…

Waking up in Indiana on Monday morning as my train trundles along the flat shores of Lake Michigan, BP’s mega-refinery at Whiting welcomes me to the outskirts of Chicago. Belching out pollutants over the local communities and into the lake since 1889, the refinery turns 410,000 barrels of crude into petrol, jet fuel and petroleum coke every…