No pipe dream: Is fracking about to arrive on your doorstep?

For the past several years, I’ve been writing about what happens when big oil and gas corporations drill where people live. “Fracking” — high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which extracts oil and methane from deep shale — has become my beat. My interviewees live in Pennsylvania’s shale-gas fields; among Wisconsin’s hills, where corporations have been mining silica, […]

Iran can now build and deliver nukes

Tehran has capacity to break out to bomb if it wishes, intelligence chief James Clapper tells Senate, but would be detected if it tried to do so An Iranian worker at the Uranium Conversion Facility at Isfahan, 410 kilometers, south of Tehran. The conversion facility in Isfahan reprocesses uranium ore concentrate, known as yellowcake, into […]

Lawmakers Mull Lifting Longtime Ban on Oil Exports

Lawmakers debated ending a decades-old ban on exporting crude oil overseas on Thursday, revisiting a restriction enacted at the height of America’s oil worries and seen by some as outdated amid a domestic energy boom. At a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, lawmakers and policy experts weighed the price stability of […]

World Bank Ex-Chief Economist Calls For End To Dollar As Reserve Currency

In the past we have discussed at length the inevitable demise of the USD as the world’s reserve currency noting that nothing lasts forever. However, when former World Bank chief economist Justin Yifu Lin warns that “the dominance of the greenback is the root cause of global financial and economic crises,” we suspect the world […]

Rebels in Syria Claim Control of Resources

Islamist rebels and extremist groups have seized control of most of Syria’s oil and gas resources, a rare generator of cash in the country’s war-battered economy, and are now using the proceeds to underwrite their fights against one another as well as President Bashar al-Assad, American officials say. While the oil and gas fields are […]

Iraq eyes return to Opec quota system

Iraq has for the first time begun preparing for a return to the Opec production quota system, in a shift of policy that reduces the prospect of oversupply and lower prices in global oil markets. Iraq, whose oil industry has recovered rapidly since the US-led invasion a decade ago, is expected to be one of […]

America’s Energy Revolution Transforms International Relations

North America’s energy revolution is remaking all aspects of the global economy and international relations in what has turned out to be the most profound shift in the second decade of the 21st century. Policymakers and climate scientists prefer to talk about the transformational potential of clean technologies like wind, solar and electric vehicles. But […]

EU Readies for Shale Gas Breakthrough

Ukraine in May hosts a summit to explore the potential for shale oil and natural gas in Europe. Ukraine and its Eastern European neighbors may host some of the more promising shale basins in the region. Now Spain and Germany are looking to explore their potential. With the European Union outlining recommendations for shale exploration, […]

Kurds’ oil deal with Turkey ‘endangers Iraq’s budget’

The feud between Iraq’s central government and the minority Kurds’ semiautonomous enclave over oil is reaching critical mass, the head of parliament’s treasury committee says. Haidar Al Abadi, a senior legislator, has warned the government’s projected 2014 budget will fall apart if Kurdistan does not hand over revenue from independent oil exports to northern neighbor […]

America’s Relative Decline: Should We Panic?

Over at the Washington Post, Charles Kenny has a provocative op-ed arguing that China’s GDP will almost certainly soon surpass America’s in absolute terms, and this is to the United States’ benefit (the op-ed is based on Kenny’s new book, which can be purchased here). Kenny’s first argument in support of this claim is that […]

Davos delegates warned of imminent oil crisis

Some of the planet’s richest nations are to hear a warning that a global oil crisis could happen as early as next year (Pic: Shell) By Alex Kirby A British businessman will tell world leaders meeting in Switzerland today that it is dangerous to argue that fracking for shale oil and gas can help to […]

‘Charge rage’: Too many electric cars, not enough workplace chargers

Eager to reduce energy use, German software company SAP installed 16 electric vehicle charging ports in 2010 at its Palo Alto campus for the handful of employees who owned electric vehicles. Just three years later, SAP faces a problem that is increasingly common at Silicon Valley companies — far more electric cars than chargers. Sixty-one […]

Iran’s Rouhani Invites Oil Companies to Invest as Sanctions End

Hassan Rouhani, the first Iranian leader in a decade to visit Davos for the World Economic Forum, invited oil companies to invest in his country as a nuclear accord with world powers triggers the lifting of some sanctions. Rouhani told a meeting of about 30 executives, mostly from the oil industry, that Iran has a […]

UK Cold-home casualties

The current ‘energy debate’ is in danger of descending into little more than an unsavoury slanging match. Ed Miliband’s price freeze proposal was a brilliant opening ploy. But in the vacuum that followed, it looked more like a policy space the Labour Party didn’t know how to fill. The moment called out for a radically […]

Oil Security 2025 report – US remains vulnerable

The inaugural work of the Commission on Energy and Geopolitics, “Oil Security 2025: U.S. National Security Policy in an Era of Domestic Oil Abundance,” explores the potential for U.S. oil production to impact American foreign policy and national security in the coming decade and presents a series of recommendations designed to safeguard and advance U.S. […]

A System Doomed To Fail

In the broadest sense, there are three types of systems in the world. The first are simple systems which are characterized by only a few variables or agents, and which can be described by perhaps a handful of equations (or even one). The second are systems which are characterized by disorganized complexity. These may consist […]

The Fracking Lobby Lie

It’s that time of year again, when fracking opponents pay Common Cause to put out a report minimizing their own lobbying activities and wailing about the those of the oil and gas industry.  Several times a year, with more regularity than Halley’s Comet, a strikingly similar headline appears in the pages of New York news […]

US eases some sanctions on Iran, including oil

The United States on Monday eased some sanctions on Iran, pausing efforts to reduce Iranian crude oil exports, as part of a nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers that went into effect. The Treasury Department said that now that Iran has fulfilled its initial nuclear commitments under the deal, “the administration has taken the […]

China Preparing to Target U.S. Aircraft Carriers

“Mutually Assured Destruction” guiding hypersonic missile policy in Washington & Beijing China’s new hypersonic missile vehicle is primarily designed to target U.S. aircraft carriers, military expert Chen Hu told the state-run China Central Television (CCTV) in yet another admission of Beijing’s increasingly hostile geopolitical posturing. The WU-14, a hypersonic glide vehicle which can penetrate missile […]

America’s Feel-Good Oil Bonanza

Think back to early 2004. Oil cost around $40 per barrel1—on the high side compared to the previous few decades but not much out of the ordinary. Gasoline still cost under $2.00 a gallon for most of the country. The evening news was more concerned with wardrobe gaffes by Janet Jackson (too little, at the […]

World powers, Iran to activate landmark nuclear deal

Iran has halted its most sensitive nuclear activity under a ground-breaking deal with world powers, a confidential U.N. atomic agency report reviewed by Reuters on Monday showed, paving the way for the easing of some Western sanctions. Western states were expected to ease sanctions later on Monday after the United Nations nuclear watchdog confirmed Iran […]

Coal, Oil, and Natural Gas Are Winning Issues

As Americans celebrate the idea that the United States is now the number one producer of natural gas and oil, some congressional Democrats are still very hostile toward all fuel fossils. Democrat Congressman Henry Waxman, who was a co-sponsor of cap-and-trade legislation, recently said “Many of us believe that (Keystone) pipeline will lock us into […]

Dutch to reduce natural gas production due to earthquakes

The Dutch Cabinet has decided to reduce the amount of gas produced from fields that lie under the country’s northernmost province by 6 percent, as the mining has caused earthquakes and damaged houses in the region. Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced the decision Friday. He said that government-commissioned studies have shown beyond a doubt that […]

Richard Heinberg: Trans-Pacific Partnership is Poison for Community Resilience

The past couple of decades of globalization have been a disaster for planetary ecosystems, indigenous peoples, and most middle-class citizens, but a gravy train for big investors, investment bankers, and managers of transnational corporations. This unprecedented expansion of international trade was driven by the convergence of key resources, developments, and inventions: cheap oil, satellite communications, […]

Federal Reserve: Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Is What Scares Us About Banks In Physical Commodities

The Federal Reserve took a potential step Tuesday to limit big banks’ activities in physical commodities, publicly outlining concerns with bank investments in ventures that can lead to deadly oil spills, pipeline ruptures and natural gas explosions. The expected move comes after months of criticism by U.S. lawmakers that large banks’ recent expansion into businesses […]

Syria: Half population urgently need aid

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says that half of Syria’s population, some 9.3 million people, now “urgently need humanitarian aid”. He was speaking at a donor conference in Kuwait launching the UN’s biggest ever appeal for a single crisis. The UN is seeking $6.5bn (£4bn) – it raised $2.4bn by the end of Wednesday. Meanwhile, […]

Arab world is moving backward

We are facing a shameful reality in the Arab world today. We are reaping what we have sowed with political splits, division of states, and threats against the concept of the state. This is a destructive, not creative chaos. The religious conflict is the worst of all. It is being employed in a political manner […]

Fears of global oil crisis aired at Transatlantic Energy Security Dialogue

Jeremy Leggett column in Recharge magazine: “We are betting our entire national economic life on the hope — indeed the expectation — that the fracking boom will continue until well into the 2020s, and that, at a rate and cost we desire, significant amounts of ‘yet to be discovered’ oil will somehow be found to […]

US has concerns about Iran-Russia oil-for-goods swap

The White House said on Monday it was concerned about a recent report that Iran and Russia are negotiating an oil-for-goods swap worth $1.5 billion a month, a deal a spokeswoman said could trigger U.S. sanctions. Such a deal would significantly boost Iran’s oil exports, which have been slashed by more than half to about […]

Iran nuclear deal to take effect on January 20

A deal between Iran and six major powers intended to pave the way to a solution to a long standoff over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions will come into force on January 20, the Iranian Foreign Ministry and the European Union said on Sunday. Shortly after the interim accord takes effect, an Iranian official added, Tehran and […]

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