Woodside Petroleum

Woodside Petroleum is an Australian company based in Perth. The company is listed on the stock index S & P / ASX 50.

Woodside Petroleum is active in finding and extracting oil. Over 3,000 employees work for the company worldwide. The company was founded in 1954 as Woodside ( Lakes Entrance) Oil Co NL. The company was named after the place in Victoria Woodside, near which the company made its first oil field.

Politics and economics

In February 2006, Ely Ould Mohamed Vall announced by the Government of Mauritania that Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya by the previous government in 2004, a contract for an oil production project, the Mauritania Chinguetti project, offshore off the coast of Mauritania in the amount of U.S. - $ 600 million have closed. Taya said that this development project in Mauritania 200 million U.S. $ costs the country annually. The Australian Federal Police investigated subsequently in June 2006 Woodside for bribery and corruption .. The relevant Australian bodies declared in May 2008 that the company had done nothing wrong.

Woodside Petroleum is said to have numerous petroglyphs from their point of origin on the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia, as it built conveyor systems for the exploitation of the local natural gas field. The Burrup Peninsula is the largest site of rock engravings that date back 30,000 years and probably also show the first human face of history.

It is believed that the lobbying of Woodside helped that the government of John Howard by the conservative Liberal Party of Australia against the CO2 emissions trading in August 2000 decided and that the oil company led the opposition to the Rudd government, the 2009 led to the ousting of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of the Australian Labor Party in 2009.

Woodside was one of the companies that affect the public in public calls for the liberation of restrictions on CO2 emissions trading. The Australian Conservation Foundation criticized the oil company exaggerated in their public statements and their share holders and investors drew a different picture. In June 2009, the Federal consumer affairs watchdog called for an investigation of the process, but the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission took no action.

With East Timor agreed Woodside exploitation of the Greater Sunrise gas field in the Timor Sea. However, the East Timorese government insists on further processing on the south coast of East Timor, to provide jobs to the local population. Woodside preferred processing first in the Australian Darwin, then an offshore processing at sea. East Timor stopped therefore provisional license for gas extraction.