oil and gas industry

Baton Rouge, LA -- TigerSwan, the mercenary firm under fire in North Dakota for using counterterrorism tactics against water protectors opposing Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, has applied for a license to provide private security in Louisiana.

While the application process does not require the firm to indicate who they will be working for, Energy Transfer Partners spokesperson Alexis Daniel said the pipeline company anticipates work to begin on the Bayou Bridge pipeline in the third quarter of this year.

On January 17, 2017, a congressional hearing to confirm Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s chosen appointee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, was held in Washington, D.C.  

It’s an incredible moment in Louisiana. Our Governor, at great political risk, has stepped forward to say that the oil industry should repair the damage it has done to our Louisiana coast. Here’s his reasoning as documented in the New Orleans Times Picayune.

I began my career in West Africa in the 1990s, where Nigerians who peacefully protested the oil industry’s destruction of their farms were raped, beaten and murdered. In the Niger Delta, violent repression was the oil industry and the Nigerian government’s response to a movement that had grown so powerful that on one day, in one protest, there were 300,000 people in the streets.

Originally posted in New American Journal on March 20, 2016.

Photo: BP oil and chemicals make landfall during Gulf oil spill, May 8, 2010: Glynn Wilson

MOBILE, Ala. – Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Between these beginnings and endings comes water. You are mostly water. Remove it and only a sift of ash and grit remains.

Most people should be familiar with the old phrase "Ace In The Hole". It refers to something very special only to be used when things are not going as planned or at the most appropriate time and place to insure success.

In football, a coach may have his team practice a certain play only to use that play once in a game or an entire season. Then again he might not use that play if he does not have to. That play becomes his insurance in case things do not go as planned and his team is in trouble. That play thus becomes that team's "Ace In The Hole".

Originally posted in New American Journal on June 17th

MOBILE, Ala. – After a couple years trudging through the weeds and thickets of laws, regulations, technical standards, hazard assessments, health effects, economic impacts and other consequences of petroleum storage tanks, Mobile has arrived at nearly the same place it began this trek.

Photo: Cover Page from No Petro-Chemical Storage Tanks on Our West Bank–A Compendium of Citizen Concerns

A few months ago there was an explosion of train tank cars of crude oil in Canada. One exploding tank car ignited another, then another, then another, etc. Final results were half a town wiped out and dozens of people killed or injured. The blast area of that explosion was estimated to have a 5 mile radius. If you allow a "storage tank city" to be built close to a community, you are asking for trouble.