Foreign oil, gas exploration firms lack efficiency: Prof Anu

Foreign oil and gas exploration companies lack efficiency and are destroying Magurchhara, said National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Ports Member Secretary Prof Anu Muhammad.
The power, energy and mineral resources ministry is acting as a "foreign agent". “Now our Bay of Bengal has been handed over to them (the exploration companies). Both the Awami League and BNP speak in the same tone,” he told a citizens' meeting. The committee's Moulvibazar unit organised the meeting in Moulvibazar Town Club on Thursday on the eve of the 16th “Magurchhara Day”.
On June 14, 1997, a massive explosion and a subsequent massive blaze tore apart the Magurchhara gas field in Moulvibazar's Kamalganj upazila while US energy company Occidental was drilling a well there.
Reports of two committees formed during the then Awami League government estimated the damage to forest resources Tk 9,858 crore, 29 tea gardens Tk 46.07 crore, the railway Tk 21 crore, Jalalabad Gas Company Tk 43 lakh and the electricity department Tk 4.35 crore.
Indigenous Khasia people lost betel leaf plantations worth Tk 18 lakh while about 96 acres of Lawachhara Reserve Forest was completely burnt. The inferno also destroyed a teak grove raised between 1944 and 1950, bamboo shacks created between 1993 and 1995, and a strip of plantation established in 1994. Though Occidental was widely blamed for the devastation, compensation still remains a far reach. Afterwards, operations of the gas field changed hands twice, to Unocal and then to Chevron.