U.S. petroleum demand dipped in 2006

WASHINGTON – While oil companies reaped gargantuan profits in 2006 amid high prices, U.S. demand for petroleum dipped for the second year in a row, a trade group said Friday. Total U.S. petroleum deliveries, a measure of demand, fell by roughly 1 percent to 20.6 million barrels per day, down from 20.8 million in 2005, […]

The Oil Drum: More on the Units of Energy

Quads, BTUs, lots of measures of “energy” out there…well to begin with it would help if we could reduce all the different terms to a common comparative base. And so that is what this post is about…Much more after the jump to The Oil Drum.

Iran: Kerosene shortage spurs thriving resale market

…Lines at the stations often stretch for blocks, and fuel can take all day to get. That’s why many Iraqis are willing to pay a premium to buy their fuel from men such as Moayid Ouda, Sha’alan’s owner, who sells a liter of kerosene for around 80 cents. “The fuel and kerosene crisis drew a […]

Iran Discovers New Onshore Oil Field

Iran has discovered a new onshore oil field with an estimated reserve of 2 billion barrels, state-run television reported Thursday. Hassan Behbahani, an official of the National Iranian Southern Oil Fields Co., said the discovery was made at the Bangestan layer of the Ab-Teymour oil field, in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, reported the state […]

Bush resists growing pressure to curb global warming

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The battle over global warming is heating up, with President George W. Bush refusing to limit greenhouse gas emissions despite growing pressure from the Democrat-led Congress and around the world. White House spokesman Tony Snow earlier this week said Bush’s position on greenhouse gases remained unchanged, no matter what was reported by […]

Kazakh PM Calls for Tighter Control of Oil

Kazakhstan’s new prime minister criticized foreign oil companies Thursday and ordered the government to tighten control over their activities in the energy-rich Central Asian nation, the government said. Karim Masimov, who assumed office last week, accused unspecified foreign oil companies of “unsatisfactory” implementation of contracts, citing “extensions of the prospecting period, delays with the start […]

Viable Investment in Energy Complicated

Interesting moves are being played on the energy chessboard. While Hugo Chavez and Ahmedinejad are out to create a block of energy rich, “anti-imperialist” forces, it is now being reported Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a “controversial […]

House passes bill forcing Big Oil to pay

Senate holds hearings on the simmering dispute of royalties, tax breaks With the price of crude falling, Big Oil faces another big headache on Capitol Hill. The House passed a bill Thursday evening to raise nearly $15 billion in taxes through a combination of higher royalties, added fees and a reversal of tax breaks handed […]

Texas view on environment is 18 lanes wide

HOUSTON (Reuters) – As President Bush readies a new plan on global warming, environmentalists say an 18-lane highway going up in Houston speaks volumes about how people in his home state of Texas view the planet. Between 2003 and 2009, $2.7 billion of state and federal money will have been plowed into expanding 23 miles […]

Blast causes partial disruption at Kuwait refinery

KUWAIT CITY (AFP) – A fire sparked by a gas pipeline blast caused a partial disruption at one of Kuwait’s three oil refineries but exports by the oil-rich emirate were not affected, officials said. “An explosion happened at around 7:00 pm (1600 GMT) at a high pressure gas line that caused a fire. The situation […]

Creating Ethanol from Trash

A new system for converting trash into ethanol and methanol could help reduce the amount of waste piling up in landfills while displacing a large fraction of the fossil fuels used to power vehicles in the United States. The technology, developed originally by researchers at MIT and at Batelle Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL), in […]

Global warming ‘just a natural cycle’

Global warming comes and goes in 1,500 year cycles which may have more to do with cosmic rays than fossil fuel emissions, according to a new book. If the genuine warming now being seen is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide, it would have started earlier, according to the book by two veteran American […]

A Light Bulb Goes on, and China Starts Thinking ‘Alternative Energy’

On the vanguard of venture capital, the buzzwords of late have been “alternative energy” and “China.” Are the two worlds about to collide? Seed investors are financing, or considering financing, start-ups in China that are developing equipment for wind and solar power, clean water and food alternatives and technology to promote energy efficiency.While this may […]

EU bio-fuel demand threatens Indonesian forests: Greenpeace

Growing European Union demand for bio-fuel could threaten Indonesia’s last remaining forests as the government approves new palm oil plantations, environmental group Greenpeace warned Thursday. “Given the indiscriminate approval by the Indonesian government for palm oil plantations, the large demand from the EU could prove to be the final nail in the coffin for our […]

Ahmadinejad be damned

It’s all over the Iranian press: President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, self-described “street cleaner of the people”, is in deep political trouble at home, subjected to crossfire from conservatives and reformers alike. All the more ironic considering the biblical tsunami of Washington spin portraying Ahmadinejad as the newest “new Hitler” (Saddam Hussein, after all, fell victim to […]

Fears over Russia move to form Opec-style gas cartel

Russian Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko will visit Algeria this weekend, a trip that is likely to fuel European fears that Russia plans to co-opt other major gas exporters into forming an Opec-style cartel.Energy analysts agree that European fears are overblown. “There’s an awful lot of sound and fury in consuming countries,” said Jonathan Stern, director […]

India needs diversified energy to fulfill requirements: Sibal

India needs to tap diversified energy sources to fulfill its requirements, as nuclear power in itself is not sufficient, Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said on Thursday. “India would require around 3,00,000 MW of power by 2020 and nuclear would contribute, at best, around 10 per cent in the supply. Nuclear energy by itself […]

Can the Saudis Back the Boast and Increase Crude Oil Production

But since when has reality stopped people from trying impossible things? “Saudi Arabia plans to increase its crude oil production capacity nearly 40 percent by 2009 and double its refining size over the next five years to keep pace with growing global demand, the country’s oil minister said Thursday,” reports today’s International Herald Tribune. Take […]

Oil Will Dominate for Next 100 Years, Predicts Shell

At Shell, where he is a manager in the company’s Fuel Technology Group, Mr. Macias is in charge of investigating which fuels will replace gasoline and developing ways to make them cheaper. But so far, there’s nothing in the pipeline that he said will transform Shell or dramatically change the way the world’s vehicles are […]

Malaysia: Act now before oil reserves deplete

Malaysia’s oil reserves will finish in 10 years. Although this can be seen as bad news, there are several positive undertones. Malaysia has enormous gas reserves. Petronas is diversifying its sources of income and it now has stakes in the oil fields of countries like Sudan. Also some 10 to 20 fields off Sarawak and […]

U.S. Oil Industry Urges Canadian Oilsands Execs to Step It Up

Canadian executives were urged to massively step up oilsands production to five million barrels of oil per day in a relatively short period of time by their counterparts in the U.S., according to documents obtained by the CBC. Executives from U.S. oil multinationals and Canadian oilsands producers met for two days in Houston, Texas, in […]

The Oil Drum: Getting a Grasp on Oil Production Volumes

Oil production numbers are often measured in millions of barrels (1 mb= 106 barrels) or billions of barrels (1 Gb= 109 barrels). In the January issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine, I found this little article: Joules, BTUs, Quads—Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off. They proposed to measure energy quantities in terms of Cubic Miles […]

Saudi to have 3m b/d spare oil in February

Saudi Arabia thepeninsulaqatar

Project to Investigate Hydrogen Production at Ethanol Plants

The Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) at the University of North Dakota is leading a project to investigate the production of hydrogen at existing and future ethanol facilities. The hydrogen produced could be used on-site in fuel cells to provide additional power for the plant or as fuel for hydrogen vehicles. greencarcongress

Peak oil production

I just came back from a trip to China, and we went there to talk about energy by the way. I was pleasantly surprised when they began their discussion of energy by saying post-oil. They get it. I wish we did. They talk about post-oil. energybulletin

Adept Technology Expands Into Rapidly Growing Solar Power Market

Adept Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADEP – News), the leading provider of intelligent vision-guided robotics and global robotics services, announced today that they have secured new design wins with four solar panel manufacturing companies in the rapidly expanding international solar power market. yahoo

Solar power eliminates utility bills in U.S. home

Michael Strizki heats and cools his house year-round and runs a full range of appliances including such power-guzzlers as a hot tub and a wide-screen TV without paying a penny in utility bills. yahoo

Step On The Gas: New Fuel Cell Design Adds Control, Reduces Complexity

When Princeton University engineers want to increase the power output of their new fuel cell, they just give it a little more gas — hydrogen gas, to be exact. This simple control mechanism, which varies the flow of hydrogen fuel to control the power generated, was previously thought impossible and is a potentially major development […]

Sherritt, Ontario Fund Plan C$1.5 Billion Gas Project

Sherritt International Corp., a Canadian metals and oil producer, may join with Canada’s third- biggest pension fund to build a C$1.5 billion ($1.28 billion) plant that would produce synthetic natural gas from coal. bloomberg

GM Chief calls on Washington to support the diversification of U.S. energy suppl

Yes, he is happy that the price of oil has dropped below $52 a barrel, a 19- month low. But he also does not think it will last. At an auto industry conference in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Wagoner called on the U.S. government to support diversifying the U.S. energy supply by using tax […]

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