Another oil spill is taking place in the world right now from an off-shore drilling operation.
The incident was at Chevron’s deep-sea drilling operation off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state in Brazil. The country’s federal police says information released by Chevron does not match what they have seen, that is, the spill is larger,
Chevron is a multinational energy corporation located in the United States but active in over 180 countries worldwide. Chevron is engaged in a number of industries, including gas, oil and geothermal energy. Chevron is known as one of the six “supermajor” oil companies in the world. In the last five years,
Chevron Energy Solutions and the City of Brea today unveiled Orange County’s largest municipal solar installation. The effort is part of a comprehensive energy efficiency and solar project expected to generate an estimated $13 million in net savings over the 25-year
Those of us who have seen the film documentary “Crude” were heartened yesterday as a court in Ecuador ordered the oil giant Chevron to pay $8.6 billion for dumping billions of gallons of toxic oil waste into Ecuador’s rain forest. The judgment is one of the largest ever imposed for environmental contamination in any court.
If I were the new CEO of Chevron, I would stop listening to the lawyers and bring the engineers into the boardroom to develop a strategy to invest a good portion of last year’s record $24 billion profit into inventing solutions to the adverse environmental and social impacts of the company’s operations around the globe.
It is clear that Chevron’s historical reliance upon litigation to get what it wants is being eclipsed by new activist strategies that have effectively boxed Chevron into a corner.
There’s been a lot out there in the ether about how Waxman-Markey (and climate change legislation in general) has been a windfall for lobbyists, fighting both to keep the government’s hands off of utilities and others’ CO2 emissions on the status quo side and scrambling for the subsidies and other dollars on the green tech side.
The Washington Post (WaPo) opened just such a story this week with an anecdote about Rep Gene Green’s (D-TX) amendment changing the word “sources” to the words “emission points.” WaPo notes “that tiny bit of editing might one day give petroleum refiners valuable rights to emit carbon dioxide when it otherwise might not have been allowed.
A couple of days ago, US energy behemoth Chevron announced it will commit $20 million over five years to a partnership with the Qatar Science and Technology Park in Doha. Lip service and green washing, you might shout.
“Chevron believes that energy efficiency and conservation are the most immediate and cost-effective sources of new energy, and we are proud to work in partnership with Qatar,” Chevron Vice Chairman Peter Robertson said.
Guess what… they really “drink the kool aid.” With oil at $45/bbl, traditional perspectives change: “The crude oil price is around half the level required to attract adequate investment in the industry,” UAE’s oil minister Mohammed al-Hamli said last week. It doesn’t make financial sense to invest in oil exploration, so if you were an energy company in 2009 where would you invest?