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The Coming Deluge of Oil

It came without warning: A flood of oil. Just a few years ago we were talking about peak oil, the slow, painful demise of crude. Now there’s talk about a shock wave of new oil supply from North America that’s about to slam into global markets. We’re in the early stages of a new oil [...]

Al-Qaeda takes over oilfields once belonging to Assad…

Al-Qaeda’s Syrian wing is helping to finance its activities by selling the product of oilfields that once helped to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Up to 380,000 barrels of crude oil were previously produced by wells around the city of Raqqa and in the desert region to its east that are now in [...]

Ten Years After Invasion, Iraq Continues to Import Oil Products

Former Iraqi oil minister Issam al-Jalabi says that although Iraq is an oil-rich country, it still imports petroleum products from abroad to meet its needs 10 years after the US-led invasion of the country. Jalabi, an international energy expert, told Azzaman that annual imports of oil derivatives reached $6 billion a few years after the occupation. He said [...]

Afghanistan to begin first commercial oil production

Afghanistan expects to begin the first commercial oil production in its history in a little under two months. The country’s mining minister, Wahidullah Shahrani, has told the ABC processing will start at the Amu Darya basin in Afghanistan’s north in July. The project is operated by the China National Petroleum Corporation and is expected to [...]

A state-run monopoly is killing Mexico’s chances of oil independence

Any time a single company is responsible for nearly 10% of a country’s GDP, it’s a problem. Thanks to a lack of competition, Pemex, the Mexican oil company responsible for producing all of the country’s oil, has seen production fall steadily over the past decade. It’s a monopoly, man Since Pemex was nationalized 75 years [...]

Arctic nations adopt marine oil pollution preparedness agreement

The world’s Arctic nations formally agreed to cooperate on marine oil pollution preparedness and response at the Arctic Council’s May 15 meeting in Kiruna, Sweden. The agreement, which was the second legally binding pact negotiated under the council’s auspices, also encourages future national, binational, and multinational contingency plans, training, and exercises to develop effective response [...]

Canadian PM: Oil going to U.S. one way or another

A controversial oil pipeline to the U.S. Gulf Coast “absolutely needs to go ahead,” Canada’s prime minister said Thursday, and he warned that the oil will be transported through America one way or another. Stephen Harper addressed the Keystone XL project, a flashpoint in the debate over climate change, during a visit to New York [...]

Production Falls as U.S. Feels Pull of Global Weakness

Industrial production declined in April by the most in eight months, indicating American manufacturers will provide little support for an economy beset by weaker global markets and federal budget cuts. The larger-than-forecast 0.5 percent decrease in output at factories, mines and utilities followed a revised 0.3 percent gain that was weaker than first reported, Federal [...]

Oil Production in the Polar Regions

Today, the Arctic Council’s eight foreign ministers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Russia, Canada and the USA meet in Sweden to discuss, among other things, oil production in the Arctic. They will attempt to agree on a binding joint treaty regarding what preparations will exist in case of an oil spill/accident. The amount of [...]

Kuwait: The Transformation Game

Kuwait’s first commercial production of oil began in 1946, some 65 years ago. Up until 1990, its production had been dominated by a few reservoirs. Burgan Al Kabeer Field (Greater Burgan) had the biggest share of the total production reaching 70-80 percent. At that time, all its production was natural flow, water free and average [...]

Iraq Oil Exports Suspended after Attack

Exports of crude oil from northern Iraq have been suspended after a new bomb attack against a key pipeline, an Iraqi person familiar with the matter and a Middle East shipping agent said Tuesday, the second such interruption in less than a week. Iraq normally exports an average of 300,000 to 350,000 barrels a day [...]

EA Sees U.S. Oil Shockwaves Displacing OPEC as Supply Driver

The U.S. shale boom will send “shockwaves” through the global oil trade over the next five years, benefiting the nation’s refiners and displacing OPEC as the driver of supply growth, the IEA said. North America will provide 40 percent of new supplies to 2018 through the development of light, tight oil and oil sands, while [...]

The Illogic And Folly Of Peak Oil (Or Is It Peak Gas?) Alarmism

The “peak oil”, “peak gas”, or peak-whatever-you-want-to-call-it mini-movement continues on, despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Last week it even made its way onto the Forbes.com website in the form of this piece authored by economist Robert U. Ayres. This piece is so filled with illogic, factual errors and omissions of context that it requires a response. [...]

BP Withdraws Staff from Libya

BP is withdrawing some of its staff from Libya amid potential violence in the country. BP said in a statement Sunday that it was withdrawing non-essential overseas staff out of Libya “as a precautionary measure” following advice given to it by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. However, BP said that its Libyan staff remain in [...]

Old Technology Fuels New Energy Boom

With U.S. oil imports hitting a 17-year low, the mainstream media has awoken to the fact that, as I pointed out three years ago, peak oil is not happening anytime soon. Charles Mann’s excellent cover story in this month’s Atlantic, “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?” focuses on an obscure, exotic, though potentially vast source of [...]

How oil travels around the world, in one map

Here’s a neat map looking at how oil travels by sea around the globe — focusing on the key “choke points” where that oil supply is most vulnerable to attack: Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration That map comes from this recent reporting project on U.S. energy security by nine student journalists at the Medill National Security Journalism [...]

Exxon and Qatar plan to ship US natural gas to Britain

Exxon Mobil and Qatar Petroleum announced an agreement on Thursday to ship liquefied natural gas to Britain from their proposed export plant in the United States, offering another supply stream to the island nation as domestic output dwindles. Under the deal, the companies would send up to 15.6 million tonnes of LNG each year to [...]

No “Peak Natural Gas” Anytime Soon

One does not hear much these days about “peak oil”, as new technologies are developed and implemented that, together with market conditions, make feasible the exploitation of previously uneconomical or irretrievable deposits. A new report by the Diplomatic Center for Strategic Studies (DCSS), based in Kuwait, just published, confirms an International Energy Agency report from [...]

Albert Oil-Sands Output Increased 10% in 2012

Alberta oil sands production increased 10 percent to 1.9 million barrels a day last year and will double to 3.8 million by 2022, the province’s energy regulator predicts. The increase came even as oil sands capital expenditures dipped 10 percent to C$20.4 billion ($20.35 billion) in 2012. Some companies cut budgets because of “increased pressure [...]

At Least 9 More Decades for North Sea Oil

Oil and gas production in the UK North Sea can continue until the end of this century provided the right government policy decisions are made, according to Scottish Energy Minister Fergus Ewing. Speaking to Rigzone at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston Tuesday afternoon, Ewing said: “In domestic terms, the [Scottish] industry is having a [...]

Shell presses ahead with world’s deepest offshore oil well

Royal Dutch Shell is pressing ahead with the world’s deepest offshore oil and gas production facility by drilling almost two miles underwater in the politically sensitive Gulf of Mexico. The move is being viewed in the oil industry as a demonstration of Shell’s confidence that its technology can deliver returns on expensive and risky offshore [...]

ExxonMobil starts Julia ultradeepwater gulf oil project

ExxonMobil Corp. will develop a field with nearly 6 billion bbl of resource in place more than 30,000 ft below the sea floor in more than 7,000 ft of water in the Gulf of Mexico. An initial development phase will result in production of 34,000 b/d of oil from Julia field starting in 2016. Capital [...]

Saudi Aramco to Open 3 US Research Centers

Saudi Aramco has announced the opening of three research centers in the United States with Houston named one of the cities to house a new facility focused on upstream research. Houston joins two other U.S.- based centers in Cambridge, Mass. and Detroit designed to extend the energy giant’s global research and development (R&D) network. The [...]

Shale Oil and Gas: The Contrarian View

No one is questioning the fact that we have either reached or will soon reach “peak oil”; that existing fields are being depleted at the rapid rate of 7 percent a year, and that the search is on for “unconventional oil” as alternative forms of energy are slow to reach critical mass. There are many [...]

How the oil and gas boom will change America: An interview with Michael Levi

Let’s get this out of the way first: Michael Levi’s new book, “The Power Surge,” is very likely to be one of the best things you’ll read about the ongoing oil and gas boom in the United States. True, the book doesn’t really have a grand overarching theory. There aren’t any sweeping predictions that shale [...]

North American tight oil play economics compared

Barry Rodgers Rodgers Oil & Gas Consulting Edmonton This report is the second of two parts on the economics and fiscal competitiveness of North American tight oil resources. The purpose of the first part of the report was to establish general context for considering the individual plays and to highlight the importance of the fiscal [...]

Surging US oil production pushes reserves to highest levels in 30 years

Surging oil production has put the United States on track toward greater energy independence, pushing US reserves to their highest levels in 30 years. But analysts say bottlenecks in the distribution system are keeping oil from reaching markets. US oil stocks reached 395.3 million barrels last week, a level not seen since US authorities began [...]

Top 10 Oil & Gas Cities in the World

For years, the petroleum industry has created significant job opportunities and economic benefits through energy hubs around the world. Innovations in technology and old-fashioned determination have allowed vast supplies of oil and gas to be brought to market from key cities in nearly every country. The running list of active and pending projects, along with [...]

Could fracking solve China’s energy problems?

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China is an oil-devouring behemoth that is almost entirely dependent on other countries for its energy needs. Also, China is fortunate enough to have massive amounts of shale gas reserves — natural gas that is trapped in sedimentary rock. Sounds like an easy solution, right? Not really. If it were, China would be tapping that rock. [...]

Oil Drilling Technology Leaps, Clean Energy Lags

Technology created an energy revolution over the past decade — just not the one we expected. By now, cars were supposed to be running on fuel made from plant waste or algae — or powered by hydrogen or cheap batteries that burned nothing at all. Electricity would be generated with solar panels and wind turbines. [...]

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