Has the US turned off the Islamic State’s oil spigot?

Having control of oil helped make the Islamic State the richest terrorist group ever. That’s one reason that U.S. and allied airstrikes have hammered its oil operations since late September. But two weeks later, one big question remains: Is the U.S.-led campaign succeeding in strangling the Islamic State’s golden goose? The terrorist group, also known […]

Keystone Be Darned: Canada Finds Oil Route Around Obama

So you’re the Canadian oil industry and you do what you think is a great thing by developing a mother lode of heavy crude beneath the forests and muskeg of northern Alberta. The plan is to send it clear to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast via a pipeline called Keystone XL. Just a few […]

Head of Pentagon and C.I.A. Says Brace for 30 Year War with ISIS

Leon Panetta is pretty much the epitome of a status quo insider… “I vividly recall how, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Obama partisans triumphantly declared that this would finally usher in the winding down of the War on Terror. On one superficial level, that view was understandable: it made sense if one assumes that […]

Russia to seek gas compromise with Kiev but debt has to be repaid

Russia’s readiness to supply natural gas to Ukraine at $385 per 1,000 cu m “is our historical position, which is rather favorable for Ukraine”, Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev says Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev instructed Energy Minister Alexander Novak on Monday to continue gas talks with Ukraine. “We certainly need to continue searching for compromises […]

Islamic State Steps Up Attack on Kurdish Syria Stronghold

Islamic State militants battled with Kurdish fighters for control of a strategic hill overlooking the Syrian town of Kobani on the border with Turkey, which the jihadist group has been besieging for three weeks. A tank and some militants standing next to a heavy machine gun were seen on the hill of Mistenur to the […]

Disclosures from railroads on crude oil to be made public

Five months after the government ordered railroads to give states information on shipments of potentially explosive crude oil across borders, Pennsylvania and some counties have not released the disclosures to the public. The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency signed confidentiality agreements with Norfolk Southern Railway Co. and CSX Transportation Inc., and told counties to do the […]

Oil Scandal Mucks Up Brazil’s Elections

When Brazil announced a massive discovery of deep sea oil in 2007, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva compared the find to a winning “lottery ticket.” Cashing it in was another story. Standing between Brazil’s oil cache and fortune were at least four miles of seawater, rock, sand and salt, plus a policy sinkhole and […]

U.S. Will Never Stop Importing Oil, but We May Start Exporting

Horizontal drilling and fracking have opened new opportunities for investing in domestic energy, whether for pure-play explorers in developing shales, producers in mature areas, or service companies opening up the monster wells. Oil and Gas Investor Editor-in-Chief Leslie Haines has been following the revolution for nine years, and agreed to share with readers of The […]

The Sources Of America’s Political & Financial Dysfunction

The way to preserve great wealth is to buy political protection of that wealth. The way to protect great political leverage is to grease the machinery of governance with cash. I confess that reading Francis Fukuyama’s latest cri du coeur in Foreign Affairs,America in Decay: The Sources of Political Dysfunction made me think Mr. Fukuyama has either been reading […]

Russia-Europe Gas Game Heats Up as Winter Looms

A cat and mouse game is on between Europe and Russia over gas supplies as the continent switches into the winter heating season. Since September, Russia’s state-controlled Gazprom has sent less-than-requested deliveries to Poland, Slovakia, Austria and Hungary — after the European Union began sending gas to Ukraine — in a clear warning from Moscow ahead of the winter heating season which officially starts on Oct. 1, when the industry switches to higher […]

Growing Middle East Threats to U.S. Energy Security

President Obama has finally recognized the growing threat of ISIS in Syria & Iraq and to U.S. national security.  To address this growing threat the Obama Administration has initiated a new Air Campaign to “degrade and destroy ISIS”.  And, to possibly avoid the need for future U.S. Armed Force’s ‘boots on the ground’ President Obama […]

Arab World’s Main Exports Are Hatred And Violence

At least since the early part of the 20th century, aside from oil, the Arab world has produced and exported two products. It has produced essentially no technology, medicine or anything else in the world of science. It has almost no contributions to world literature, art or to intellectual development. According to the most recent […]

Oil’s corroding pipeline

Oil and gas burned furiously through the independence referendum campaign. Quite a lot was said by people on both sides who should have known better. It’s now the subject of a conspiracy theory suggesting vast reservoirs were being hidden from voters. Oil and Gas UK, the industry body, has just published its annual economic report, […]

ISIS Reportedly Moving In On Baghdad

ISIS is reportedly closing in on Baghdad. This is the claim being made by the vicar of Iraq’s only Anglican Church. According to him, the Islamic militant group is only about one mile away from the Iraqi capital. Airstrikes against ISIS targets were supposed to stop the group from taking Baghdad. But, the advance by […]

Paul Craig Roberts: Washington’s Secret Agendas

One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its hidden agendas. The public fell for the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan are terrorists allied with al Qaeda. Americans fought a war for […]

Australian Government tries to hide its own peak oil report

I find myself somewhat surprised some local peak oil activists managed to get the odious Piers Akerman at the awful Daily Telegraph to print this story, but I guess stranger things have happened – TOD ANZ points to the story – Australian Government tries to hide its own peak oil report. The Daily Telegraph has […]

To Become Oil Barons, ISIS Has Sold To Neighbors And Enemies

Existing black-market structures have helped the Islamic State convert oil into cash – and their customers have included their ardent foes across borders in Turkey and Southern Iraq. NPR

Crash Course – Chapter 15 – Demographics

Age distribution is too lopsided to support entitlements When Americas social security and health care and entitlement systems were first conceived, the country has much different age distribution. There were roughly 7 active workers per retiree, and the ability to transfer some of that employee wealth to support older citizens was supportable. But with the […]

Rouhani: Courage needed to clinch nuclear deal

Iran President Hassan Rouhani said Friday “courageous decisions” must be made to clinch a long-term nuclear agreement and that any deal without the lifting of all sanctions against Tehran was “unacceptable.” Speaking to reporters in New York on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly, he added that progress in the latest round of […]

Ukraine to pay $3.1bn of Gazprom debt by end of 2014

Ukraine will pay Gazprom $2 billion for gas it has received from Russia by the end of October and an additional $1.1 billion by year’s end, EU Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger announced. The amount that Ukraine is expected to pay Russia is short of the $5.3 billion that Kiev currently owes Gazprom. Gazprom will resume […]

Will Russia and China Hold Their Fire Until War Is the Only Alternative?

Obama’s September 24 speech at the UN is the most absurd thing I have heard in my entire life. It is absolutely amazing that the president of the United States would stand before the entire world and tell what everyone knows are blatant lies while simultaneously demonstrating Washington’s double standards and belief that Washington alone, […]

A Look Inside The Secret Deal With Saudi Arabia That Unleashed The Syrian Bombing

For those to whom the recent US campaign against Syria seems a deja vu of last summer’s “near-war” attempt to ouster its president Bashar al-Assad, which was stopped in the last minute due to some very forceful Russian intervention and the near breakout of war in the Mediterranean between US and Russian navies, it is […]

Islamic State Oil Refineries in Syria Hit in Airstrikes

U.S. and Arab warplanes attacked oil refineries in eastern Syria controlled by Islamic State to undercut the extremist Sunni group’s revenue and impede its mobility, the Pentagon said. As the U.K. prepared for a parliamentary vote tomorrow to authorize joining the broadest Arab-U.S. military coalition since the 1991 Gulf War, aircraft and drones operated by […]

Airstrikes by U.S. and Allies Hit ISIS Targets in Syria

The United States and allies launched airstrikes against Sunni militants in Syria early Tuesday, unleashing a torrent of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from the air and sea on the militants’ de facto capital of Raqqa and along the porous Iraq border. American fighter jets and armed Predator and Reaper drones, flying alongside warplanes from […]

Sapping Europe’s Energy Security

The European Union’s energy security is under threat — one of its largest suppliers of natural gas has gone rogue. If Vladimir V. Putin’s efforts to destabilize Ukraine had culminated in an invasion, up to 15 percent of Western Europe’s total supply would have been immediately cut off. Ukraine has the world’s largest gas-transit system. Even if the risk […]

Islamic State closes in on Syrian town, refugees flood into Turkey

Islamic State militants tightened their noose on a northern Syrian border town on Sunday as the United Nations said the number of Syrian Kurds fleeing into neighbouring Turkey may have topped 100,000 and was likely to go much higher. Residents fleeing the frontier town of Ayn al-Arab, known in Kurdish as Kobani, and its surrounding […]

Peace in the Middle East: Why It’s Possible, and Why Big Oil May Be the Key

Noted French Economist, legislator, and writer Claude Frederic Bastiat is famous for saying, “If goods don’t cross borders, armies will.” Nowhere does this appear more true than in the war-torn Middle East, where Israel and its Arab neighbors have been at each other’s throats for over 60 years. Here’s an example: In 2012, Egypt, which under its 1979 […]

Pro-Iraq Coalition Challenged to Turn Talk Into Action

The U.S. has assembled an unlikely coalition of more than 40 nations with a shared stake in defeating Islamic State, an effort that’s counting on Iraqi troops and moderate Syrian rebels to retake and hold territory the extremists have seized. That’s something they haven’t done well in the recent past. Iraqi government troops fled in […]

Tony Hayward: Sanctions against Russia could spur $150 oil

Western sanctions against Russia, coupled with ongoing political instability in Libya and the advance of ISIS militants in Iraq, could leave the global oil supply exposed and push up oil prices to $150 per barrel, former BP chief Tony Hayward has warned. The former CEO of BP and now chairman of Glencore Xstrata said the […]

ISIS’ Next Target: The Suez Canal

Following ISIS blitzkrieg in which it took over nearly half of Iraq and a third of Syria in the blink of an eye, at which point it created its own Islamic State Caliphate resulting in Obama’s own personal war against the jihadists, some have wondered what is ISIS’ next step: surely its leadership will not […]

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