Stop shipping volatile oil by rail

The tragedy of the train derailment in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, has brought home just how small our world has become. Oil that was drilled in North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields is loaded onto rail cars and passes through a small Canadian community and shatters their world in an instant. All my thoughts and best wishes go […]

Texas pumping more oil than some OPEC countries

We all know oil production in Texas has soared in recent years. But putting the rise in graphic form shows just how phenomenal the energy turnaround has been: The surge looks exponential. In March, Texas oil production reached its highest level since 1984. That month, the Lone Star State pumped more than 74 million barrels […]

Egypt condemned to continued chaos without its earnings from oil!

On the ASPO Sweden website Martin Saar has written a good article on Egypt and how declining income from oil production is a source of that nation’s current problems. It is definitely a problem for their future. (The text is translated to English by Michael Lardelli). Egypt condemned to continued chaos without its earnings from […]

The Shale Oil Revolution Is Already Ending And Oil Prices Are Going To Surge

AllianceBernstein’s Bob Brackett has weighed in on the debate over whether the global shale revolution is merely hype. And his answer is: yes —in part. As far as U.S. shale gas goes, it’s pretty much living up to the talk: the newer plays are seeing strong recovery rates over large acreage, meaning gas will keep […]

Shale Drillers Squeeze Costs as Era of Exploration Ends

The pioneers of America’s shale gas and oil revolution have done their work. Now it’s time for the factory crews to take over. After spending $53 billion on a land binge to find hydrocarbons, the petroleum industry is counting on technological innovations — better imaging data, speedier and longer horizontal drilling, among them — to […]

Pipeline vs. Rail: Canada Oil Train Crash

By EconMatters   Almost exactly like the 2010 movie “Unstoppable” which tells the story of a runaway freight train carrying hazardous chemicals, another unmanned 73-tanker runaway train full of crude oil also was passing through a small town of Lac-Megantic in Quebec, Canada on an early Saturday morning, July 6.  However, in the movie, the runaway […]

Gulf platform evacuated after leak from decades-old well

Semi-subermisible oil rigs and jackup drilling units in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Cameron, La. (Aaron M. Sprecher/Bloomberg) Five workers were forced to evacuate a platform in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday evening when gas condensate began escaping from a Talos Energy well. The decades-old well south of Louisiana has been […]

If you care about the environment, you should welcome natural gas fracking

Shale gas is reshaping America’s economy, environment and politics in still surprising ways. It was an unpredicted phenomenon, but shale gas, now more than a decade old, accounts for 40% of the natural gas in the US. The success of shale production, that has reached large areas of America where no gas development previously existed, […]

The shale gas revolution: is it already over?

link to data The production of natural gas in the US has not been increasing for about two years. Fitted with a Gaussian function, it shows a peak in the second half of 2012 and, from then on, a tendency to decline. Decoupled in its various components, the data show that shale gas production is […]

Shale Truth Interviews Arthur Berman segment #2 Profitability

The Delaware Riverkeeper Network is producing a series of interviews with experts discussing the environmental and economic impacts of shale gas extraction. In this segment Delaware Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum asks energy industry expert Arthur Berman about the profitability of the shale gas industry.

Veolia to Build Saudi Desalination Plant on Petrochemical Demand

Veolia Environnement, Europe’s biggest water company, won a contract to build a desalination plant in Saudi Arabia that will supply a petrochemicals factory. The design and construction will generate $310 million in revenue, and operations will deliver $92 million over 10 years, the Paris-based company said today in a statement. The order, awarded by Saudi […]

Don’t Get Carried Away By The Shale Oil Boom

North American crude oil has been in the news on several fronts this week, including some rapid price moves and an unexpected intervention by President Obama. Despite the publication of a new report projecting a much more rapid rate of tight oil supply growth than is generally expected and the entire Buffet-Railroad-Traffic-Pipeline meme relying on […]

Nigeria: Navy – We Can’t Stop Oil Thieves

Nigeria Worse than Somalia on Global Piracy Report The Nigeria Navy, an integral force in federal government’s battle against the increasing cases oil theft, may not be able to contain the scourge, Sunday Trust’s investigations have revealed. Reliable naval sources confided in this publication last week in Port Harcourt that efforts of the Joint Task […]

Mexico oil output slumps to near two-year low

Mexican crude oil production slid to its lowest level in nearly two years in May, while exports were their weakest in more than two decades, official data showed on Friday. Crude output at state oil monopoly Pemex, which President Enrique Pena Nieto has pledged to reform in the coming months, fell to 2.51 million barrels […]

Maugeri predicts Saudi America Will Overtake Saudi Arabia As The World’s Top Oil Producer Within A Decade

There’s still some debate about whether America’s shale oil boom is  merely an overnight sensation or a true-blue gamechanger — we’ve featured both sides here. In a new study published by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, former oil company executive Leonardo Maugeri predicts that for America’s three largest shale oil plays — the Bakken in […]

Energy Products: Return on Investment is Already Too Low

My major point when I gave my talk at the Fifth Biophysical Economics Conference at the University of Vermont was that our economy’s overall energy return on investment is already too low to maintain the economic system we are accustomed to. That is why the economy is showing signs of heading toward financial collapse. Both […]

Gazprom Wants to Supply 15 Percent of World’s LNG

Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom is planning to boost its exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to corner up to 15 percent of the world market for the fuel, CEO Alexei Miller said Friday. The Russian gas giant is turning to lucrative Asian LNG contracts against a backdrop of growing domestic competition and falling demand […]

India to Eclipse China as World’s Coal Power

India is burning coal in power plants at the fastest pace in 31 years. At the same time, domestic supplies of natural gas that are the main alternative are falling at the quickest rate in Asia, data from 2012 compiled by BP Plc (BP/) show. Both trends run counter to those in most major economies […]

Study Claims EROEI of Fracked Gas Higher Than Coal

Hydraulic fracking has been studied with a published paper showing the energy return on investment (aka EROI) with a total input energy compared with the energy in natural gas expected to be made available to end users is similar to or better than coal. The news for the natural gas industry, consumers and landowners lucky […]

OPEC to Boost Shipments as Demand Peak Nears

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will raise shipments by 1.9 percent through the middle of July as summer demand for driving fuels in the northern hemisphere nears its highest point, Oil Movements said. The group that supplies about 40 percent of the world’s oil will ship 24.03 million barrels a day in the four […]

What natural gas glut? Just export, baby, export!

Drill, baby, drill! Energy companies are doing that all over America right now, sparking fears of a natural gas glut. But the experts are not concerned, saying demand — especially from overseas — is increasing and the United States needs to simply export more of the natural gas it is producing. In what the International […]

U.S. Oil and Gas at Greater Risk for Cyber Attacks

The U.S. energy sector, including oil and gas producers, was hit by more targeted malware attacks from April to September last year than any other industry, says a new Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) report, citing data from a Houston-based security company, Alert Logic. U.S. oil and natural gas operations are increasingly vulnerable to cyber […]

Norway overtakes Russia as Europe’s biggest gas supplier

Russia lost its position as the main supplier of gas to EU last year as Gazprom exports fell by 10% knocked down by coal and high prices. High gas prices in the EU coupled with cheap coal from the US, have made coal a more attractive fuel for power stations, according a new energy report […]

The Energy Efficiency Gap & The Research Myth

Every time energy policy is being discussed, you’ll usually find a call for more R&D spending at the top of the list of ways to solve problems. While I agree that research is great, it’s obviously not enough and, if anything, only the first step. Unfortunately, calls for more R&D spending can sometimes be nothing […]

Will Israel’s rush to export natural gas turn out to be a mistake?

As the United States contemplates exporting natural gas to the rest of the world, previously energy-poor Israel seems about to jump on the export bandwagon. The current government is seeking approval to export about 40 percent of the production from its newly discovered offshore natural gas fields. In an era of high volatility in energy […]

Tech Talk – Insecurity in the Middle East

The continuing conflict in Syria, and the slow spread of violence in the region around it continue to make it difficult to make accurate predictions about the future of oil exports from the region. Within Syria itself, production had fallen into decline about ten years ago, before the current struggle began. The precipitate drop over […]

Natural gas in ‘golden age’

The International Energy Agency said on Thursday that natural gas was enjoying “a golden age” even if the growth in output over the next five years will be a lower-than-expected 2.4 percent instead of 2.7 percent forecast earlier. The IEA’s Medium-Term Gas Market Report pointed out that shale discoveries in North America and China’s attempts […]

We Will Not Run Out of Fossil Fuels

Jeffrey Rissman, policy analyst at Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology, contributed this article to LiveScience’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Fossil fuels are formed from the remains of plants and animals that died hundreds of millions of years ago, buried and transformed by heat and pressure. Since these fuels require millions of years to form, […]

Unconventional oil, gas continues to change US energy landscape

While unconventional oil and gas technology breakthroughs have dramatically changed the US oil and gas outlook in the last 5 years, US Sec. of Energy Ernest Moniz said it will be important to recognize and continue progress in other forms of energy as well. “The energy security problems of many of our allies could become […]

Reasons Mexico’s Oil Production Has Stagnated

Mexico´s crude production peaked at 3.455 Mbopd in 2004 and has already declined to 2.568 Mbopd, (Feb 28, 2013). I believe it will not be possible to return to former production levels, nor even to the present official forecast of 3 million barrels per day, because of the following reasons: The giant and supergiant oil reservoirs, like Cantarell, […]

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