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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.
The corruption-prone country expects oil revenues to total $160 billion by 2025.
Venezuela has
given the world's biggest oil company, ExxonMobil, until the end of
this year to enter a joint venture with the state.
Failure to do so will almost certainly result in Exxon losing its oil field concessions in the country.
Venezuela's socialist government has now signed new agreements with almost all foreign petroleum companies.
After months of pressure from left- wing leader Hugo Chavez most foreign oil firms working there have caved in.
An antitrust lawsuit filed against Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP PLC claims the two oil giants are restricting the nation's supply of natural gas and keeping prices at record highs.
Oil giant Total is to compensate Burmese villagers who claimed they were used as forced labour during the building of a major gas pipeline.
December 9, 2005
Ebocha Journal
Strangers in the Dazzling Night: A Mix of Oil and Misery
By LYDIA POLGREEN
EBOCHA, Nigeria - The sun had almost set, and another glum happy hour arrived at One for the Road. Veronica, its proprietor, put out her white plastic chairs and tables, checked her stock of chilled beer and waited for paying customers. There was no need to switch on the lights. Across from her tavern, day and night, burns a ghastly, eternal flame.
Azerbaijan prepares for another round of oil wealth and risk as a consortium led by BP gets ready to pump one million barrels a day from a big offshore field to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.
Azerbaijan may be experiencing an oil boom but analysts warn it could be short-lived and millions of ordinary Azerbaijanis have so far seen little of the windfall from oil revenues.
About 50 Cofan Indians, some holding handkerchiefs over their faces to fend off an acrid chemical stench, gathered around two contaminated open pits they say were left behind and never adequately cleaned up by the former Texaco Corp.
A consortium of eight companies said on Thursday that it would spend about $100 million to prepare applications to build two nuclear reactors, in Mississippi and Alabama, a step that seems to move the industry closer to its first new reactor order since the 1970's.
Oklahoma-based Kerr-McGee's contract with Morocco to explore for oil and gain in the contested territory on the Atlantic coast of northern Africa is complicating a 30 year independence struggle.
The oil crisis is hitting Indonesia - one the world's biggest oil producers - as it struggles to end subsidised prices for petrol.
As the lobbying heats up in Washington over Unocal, a midsize American oil company, the battle lines in the takeover contest are now drawn clearly, if oddly, by its suitors.