The dawn of the age of renewable energy could be even more complicated from a geopolitical perspective than the age of fossil fuels, shifting national and regional power to new players.
News that the UK lobbied Brazil on behalf of Shell and BP has sparked a political fallout in Brazil.
An attempt by Liam Fox’s Department for International Trade (DIT) to lobby on behalf of Shell and BP while the companies looked to secure lucrative oil blocks off the coast of Brazil has led to a major political controversy in the country. The political furor was triggered by a diplomatic telegram obtained by Unearthed under
Key information in the diplomatic cable was mistakenly highlighted, instead of being redacted.
A minister from Liam Fox’s Department for International Trade (DIT) lobbied the Brazilian government to smooth the path for BP and Shell to secure oil blocks in the country’s controversial pre-salt region, according to a diplomatic cable that officials accidentally failed to redact.
Corexit is a chemical dispersant which was used extensively during the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, despite evidence that the chemical had harmful effects on sea life in the Gulf of Mexico, BP plans to use it in the case of a spill in the sensitive ecosystem of the Amazon Reef.
The reef – which is largely undocumented – is believed to be more than a thousand miles long, stretching from the southern tip of French Guiana to Brazil’s Maranhão State.
The controversial offshore oil drilling project in the mouth of the Amazon river could pose a significant risk to the mysterious nearby coral reef, according to documents filed by Total and BP. The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for drilling blocks shared by the European oil giants claims there is an up to 30% chance that a prospective
The discovery of the reef has raised concerns that oil exploration in the area poses a threat to a vast ecosystem that isn’t yet understood.
BP and Total are planning to drill for oil near a recently discovered coral reef off the coast of Brazil, Energydesk can reveal. Together the oil majors own five deepwater exploration licences in the Foz do Amazonas (Mouth of the Amazon River) basin and are expected to be granted permits to begin exploratory drilling early this year – once their
Taken at face value, one could applaud BP’s decision to finally pull the plug on the project rather than stubbornly struggle on.
While BP’s decision to cancel its plans to drill in the pristine Great Australian Bight ends a public relations nightmare for the company, questions remain about BP’s and its peers’ growth-led and frontier-dependent business model. BP’s announcement binning its Bight ambitions suggests that the project is no longer
