At Oil & Gas Journal, we categorize stories by sectors of the industry. As an OGJ reporter deciding how to approach any given story, I created another category. It's the "Oh brother, here we go again," category.
This category announces its arrival with the clanging of mental warning bells, triggered by memories of my favorite journalism professor. When sending his reporting students out on assignment, he always said we should carry fresh notebooks, correct change for pay telephones, and a grain of salt.
Reporters must approach stories with a grain of salt because some characters are motivated by hidden agendas. If a journalist grabs the obvious version of a story from the most vocal, easiest accessible source, then that journalist risks missing the real story.
The "Oh, brother" category can involve numerous topics that require digging for the background details to accurately grasp all sides of the story. Occasionally, such a story involves lawsuits aimed at multinational oil companies for alleged human rights abuse, alleged environmental atrocity, etc.
Controversial issues never are as seemingly clear-cut as sometimes reported on the run for deadline by some media outlets. This is demonstrated by two recent story examples. The first involves the latest development in a lawsuit about Unocal Corp.'s Yadana natural gas pipeline in Myanmar, and the pipeline's alleged role in human rights violations there.
The second example involves Occidental Petroleum Corp.'s controversial Gibraltar-1 well in Colombia. The wildcat was on the Siriri association contract, formerly known as the Samore block.
Yadana pipeline lawsuit
A lawsuit involving the Yadana pipeline's construction was filed in 1996 and has garnered a lot of media attention. A Los Angeles Superior Court has cleared the way for Unocal to stand trial in September (OGJ Online, June 13, 2002).
An interesting detail that often goes unreported by the mainstream media is the profile of the plaintiffs' attorneys, the International Labor Rights Foundation in Washington, DC.
The ILRF has filed six human rights lawsuits against various US corporations on behalf of plaintiffs living outside the US. The litigation includes a lawsuit against ExxonMobil Corp. filed in a Washington, DC, federal court on behalf of seven men and four women from Aceh, Indonesia.
Attorneys for the 11 villagers accuse ExxonMobil of paying and directing Indonesian government security forces who allegedly committed "murder, torture, crimes against humanity, sexual violence, and kidnapping" to protect LNG facilities in ExxonMobil's joint venture with Pertamina.
Using the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) as the basis for its lawsuits, the ILRF figures among activist organizations trying to pressure US corporations working abroad. Readers deserve to be informed about this trend. The story behind the headline is how some attorneys routinely use a legal instrument as a vehicle to generate attention about pressure groups' claims of hu- man rights abuses by US corporations.
It's important to note that the Yadana pipeline project operator, TotalFinaElf SA, is not the focus of the ILRF lawsuit because, as a Franco-Belgian company, it isn't subject to ATCA.
Gibraltar wildcat controversy
Occidental's wildcat in Colombia was opposed by an internet-savvy coalition of outside nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that claimed to be acting on behalf of the U'wa indigenous community, which reportedly opposed oil operations on ancestral land extending beyond the reservation.
Spurred on by the NGOs, the U'wa also reportedly threatened, as a last resort, to commit mass suicide by jumping off a cliff if the well was drilled. Because of such opposition, the project was delayed for years.
A Bogota court temporarily halted exploration activities but later ruled that Gibraltar was outside the U'wa reservation and had no legally recognized impact on the indigenous community. At their closest point, the Gibraltar area and U'wa reservation are a full kilometer apart.
During the lengthy debate, the NGOs described Gibraltar-1 as being in the rain forest. The media en masse, including OGJ once (OGJ, Nov. 29, 1999, p. 18), also called it rain forest.
But Occidental said the actual well site was in a developed area 1.5 miles off the national Saravena-Cucuta highway. The Cano Limon-Covenas pipeline runs parallel to the highway in that area (OGJ, Jan. 17, 2000, p. 29).
Starting in November 2000, the well was drilled without triggering a mass suicide. Occidental spent $66 million in drilling costs alone looking for oil but came up with a dry hole. The company stopped drilling the Gibraltar-1 in July 2001 for technical and economic reasons.
Last month, the activist group Amazon Watch issued a news release calling Occidental's departure from Colombia's Siriri block "a great victory for the U'wa...the company's continuing public relations conflicts around (the) U'wa issue weighed heavily on the decision."
Reporters working without their salt could easily swallow the implication that the NGOs' campaign succeeded in running off Occidental because of bad publicity regardless of the geology.