Energy, Mining & Utilities

A $6.3 billion coal mine project in the Galilee Basin in Queensland that could impact the Great Barrier Reef, has been halted by Tony Burke, Australian environment minister. The Alpha project is the first of several major coal projects being pushed by Campbell Newman, the premiere of Queensland. Read More

Vedanta Resources, a UK based mining and metals company with numerous projects in India, is attempting to claim to be social responsible via a huge advertising campaign. However activists have struck back by effectively using social media tools to counter Vedanta's claims. Read More

President Barack Obama personally helped Shell obtain authorization to drill for oil in Alaska, according to a new article in the New York Times. This comes a day afer activists launched two reports on the environemental impact of the drilling plans at the company's annual meeting in the Hague. Read More

Repsol, a multinational based in Spain, has brought a class action lawsuit in New York courts against the Argentine government for the re-nationalization of YPF, the former Argentine state oil company. Environmentalists question both parties over the impact of the company. Read More

War has been declared on Enbridge, a Canadian oil company, by a chief from the Nadleh Whut'en in British Columbia. Chief Martin Louie was attending the company annual general meeting in Toronto where he spoke out Wednesday against the environmental impact of the company's tar sands operations. Read More

Protestors targeted annual general meetings of Enbridge and Bank of America this week for the devastating environmental consequences of extracting energy from two new and unconventional sources: tar sands and mountain top coal. Read More

KLM, the Dutch airline, has been forced to backtrack from a plan to use oil from jatropha seeds grown in Indonesia for commercial flights, after Friends of the Earth Netherlands put out a report criticizing the potential impact on local food supplies. Read More

An oil spill in northern Russia from a joint venture between Lukoil and Bashneft has damaged fragile reindeer pastures in yet another blow to the indigenous Nenets people. Environmental activists have warned about such disasters for decades but few precautions have been taken by the oil companies. Read More

Children as young as ten in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, dig for cobalt and copper which they then sell to Switzerland-based Glencore, the world's largest commodities company, according to a new BBC investigation. Read More

Grupo Bozovich - Peru's biggest hardwood exporter - has been accused of harvesting illegal timber, in a new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency. The Laundering Machine report claims that many of the timber certificates do not represent the actual source of the wood. Read More