Did Israel Attack Syria Again?

The IDF is refusing to comment on reports that Israel attacked the Al-Miza military airbase near Damascus last night, which if true could lead to a Syrian response and a massive escalation of the 27 month conflict. Image: Wikimedia Commons A Syrian television station sympathetic to anti-Assad rebels reported that Israel was responsible for the [...]

75-Year Pemex Oil Monopoly to End This Year

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said he’s confident Congress will end the state oil monopoly this year, opening the way for companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) to tap the nation’s reserves. In the model envisioned by Pena Nieto, state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos would develop some fields, while others are [...]

“All of the Above” Energy Policy Must Be Weighted by Common Sense

“All of the Above” is just a cliché if not tempered by an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of different energy sources, and a standard basis of comparison. Renewable energy is gaining market share, but fossil fuels–especially oil and gas–will play crucial roles in the energy mix for decades. Last month, Real Clear Politics [...]

Additional Iranian Oil Sanctions May Be Counterproductive

A June 6, 2013, article from Reuters is titled, “Lawmakers in new drive to slash Iran’s oil sales to a trickle.” According to it, U.S. lawmakers are embarking this summer on a campaign to deal a deeper blow to Iran’s diminishing oil exports, and while they are still working out the details, analysts say the ultimate goal [...]

US and the Middle East

Of all the mistakes the US can make about an especially turbulent Middle East, one should be especially easy to describe and avoid. The mistake is to assume that a surge in production of oil and gas from unconventional resources in North America means the US has diminishing reason to worry about Middle Eastern affairs. [...]

Why we should speed U.S. gas exports

John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, is a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When President Obama meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of Eight meeting this week, there should be a spotlight on our two nations’ drastically different approaches to natural gas [...]

Iran Sends 4,000 Troops To Aid Syria’s Assad

While the world awaits Russia’s formal response to last week’s US escalation in Syria (as Putin demonstratively arrived an hour late for talks on Syria with UK PM David Cameron) another country: Iran – fresh from an election in which moderate candidate Hassan Rohani became the new president – is taking matters into its own [...]

Hassan Rouhani wins Iran presidential election

Reformist-backed cleric Hassan Rouhani has won Iran’s presidential election, securing just over 50% of the vote and so avoiding the need for a run-off. Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf was well behind in second place. Turnout was estimated at 72.2% among the 50 million Iranians who were eligible to vote to choose a successor to [...]

Saudi king cuts short holiday in Morocco

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah arrived in Jeddah from Casablanca on Friday, having cut short a private holiday in Morocco, the state news agency said. The elderly king returned early because of “repercussions of the events that the region is currently witnessing,” the agency said, in an apparent reference to Syria. Saudi Arabia has been a [...]

Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocks

NSA Prism is motivated in part by fears that environmentally-linked disasters could spur anti-government activism Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealand court records [...]

US “Finds” Chemical Weapon Use Against Syrian Rebels; Military Proposes Arming Rebels, No-Fly Zone

The “red-line” has been crossed. The New York Times is reporting that: U.S. CONCLUDES SYRIA USED CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST REBELS: NYT, and NYT SAYS EUROPEAN OFFICIALS REACH SAME CONCLUSION ON SYRIA MCCAIN SAYS U.S. TO PROVIDE WEAPONS TO SYRIAN REBELS And alongside that finding, as part of (or justification for?) the arming of the Syrian [...]

UN says nearly 93,000 killed in Syrian civil war

Syrians are being killed at an average rate of 5,000 per month, the U.N. said Thursday as it raised the overall death toll in the civil war to nearly 93,000, with civilians bearing the brunt of the attacks. The grim estimate reflects the growing sectarian nature of the bloodshed as the regime of President Bashar [...]

Peru Seeks Investments of at Least $1B in Amazon Oil Auction

Peru’s government aims to attract more than $1 billion in investments in an upcoming public auction of 26 oil concessions in the country’s Amazon region, a top government official said. The chairman of government agency Perupetro, Luis Ortigas, said that exploration investments in each concession will be between $40 million and $50 million. “If it [...]

Workers protest at consulate in Saudi Arabia

Indonesian workers frustrated by long waits to get exit visas from Saudi Arabia protested outside their Jeddah consulate on Sunday, setting fire to the building’s outer wall and briefly clashing with security forces, witnesses said. Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers in the world’s top oil exporter are trying to rectify their immigration status or [...]

Comment Period Extension for Fracking Regulations Justified

The Bureau of Land Management’s 60-day comment period extension for hydraulic fracturing rules proposed last month for federal and Indian lands will be needed to allow the oil and gas industry to effectively review and comment on all existing various state and federal agency regulatory activities that overlap with much of what BLM is proposing, [...]

US extends sanction relief to China, others for cutting Iran’s oil supply

  The Obama administration will extend six-month sanctions exemptions to China, India and seven other countries for significantly reducing oil imports from Iran, officials said Tuesday, as the U.S. imposed new measures  against companies believed to be acting as a front network to help the Iranian government evade international financial restrictions. The waivers will be [...]

Russian Arms, Syria and the Price of Oil

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, in a broadcast this Thursday past, boasted of the Russian arms deliveries to the Syrian regime that would include deliveries of a highly advanced anti-aircraft weapons system. Whether accurate or not, the Russians are clearly stoking the fires of the Syrian debacle and now risking its spread beyond Syria’s borders. [...]

Texas man pleads guilty to trying to blow up natural gas pipeline, possessing homemade bomb

A self-described political activist pleaded guilty in federal court today to attempting to blow up a natural gas pipeline with a homemade bomb last June in Plano. Anson Chi, 34, of Plano pleaded guilty to possessing an explosive device composed of methyl nitrate and other parts that was not registered with the National Firearms Registration [...]

What is Happenning in Istanbul?

To my friends who live outside of Turkey: I am writing to let you know what is going on in Istanbul for the last five days. I personally have to write this because at the time of my writing most of the media sources are shut down by the government and the word of mouth [...]

Post Carbon Institute Goes to Washington

It may be an exaggeration to say that the nation’s capital was built on a swamp, but being there with temperatures hovering at 90°F (32°C) and humidity at nearly 100%, you can see why that myth has persisted. It doesn’t help that the political climate makes the air feel that much more oppressive. Speaking of [...]

Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell seeks to reopen Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling debate

Gov. Sean Parnell, R-Alaska, accused Democrats of stifling domestic energy production and inhibiting job growth in the weekly Republican address on Saturday, reopening the debate about drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and calling on the Senate and the White House to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline. “Most Americans [...]

Minister Reiterates OPEC Members’ Opposition to Anti-Iran Sanctions

Iranian Oil Minister Rostam Qassemi, who is in Vienna to attend the conference of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, said that members of the OPEC are against the West’s unilateral sanctions against Tehran. Speaking upon arrival in Vienna on Thursday evening, Qassemi said the unilaterally imposed western sanctions against Iran are another issue that would [...]

Blood for oil

There’s quite a bit of scholarship about oil and civil conflict, but the role oil plays in driving interstate war is a bit less understood. A clever paper by Fracesco Caselli of LSE, Massimo Morelli of Columbia University, and Dominic Rohner of the University of Lausanne attempts to measure this by looking at whether the [...]

Get Apocalyptic: Why Radical is the New Normal

In December 2008, Tim DeChristopher attended a protest at a federal auction of drilling rights to Utah wilderness lands. He found a better way to disrupt the auction when he picked up a paddle and began bidding on the leases as “Bidder 70.” He won $1.8 million worth of parcels and inflated the price of [...]

The Enron analog

The Executive Branch of the US government is beginning to look like Enron just before bankruptcy. That’s not to say the administration of Barack Obama has criminals in high office, as Enron did. The basis for comparison here is consistent, unabashed, and in too many instances motivational hubris. The title of a 2003 book by [...]

Iran: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah clinically dead

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz is reported to be clinically dead as the monarch is not recently seen in the public. A Saudi journalist working for London-Based Asharq Alawsat says the Saudi monarch has been clinically dead since Wednesday. He also quoted medical sources in Saudi Arabia as saying that the king’s vital organs, [...]

The Unintended Consequences of Exporting Natural Gas

The best intentions during an election campaign have a habit twisting beyond recognition once a candidate is in power. I doubt when Barack Obama was teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago he thought that, once in the White House, his Administration would be responsible for one of the most chilling crackdowns on the [...]

Kuwait oil minister’s resignation accepted

The resignation of Kuwait’s oil minister Hani Hussein has been accepted, local media reported, after he came under pressure from lawmakers wanting to question him over a $2.2 billion compensation payment to Dow Chemical Co . Earlier this month the parliament speaker said some members of the cabinet had offered to resign, without giving details. [...]

The Oil Extremists

The federal Energy Information Administration reported in March that at some point this year — maybe in the fall, maybe next month, maybe tomorrow — United States crude oil production will surpass imports for the first time since 1995. This is an important milestone. It does not mean that America has reached energy independence, not [...]

Bahraini protesters clash with police

Thousands rally in village of Diraz to demonstrate against a raid last week on a top Shia cleric’s home. Thousands of anti-government protesters have rallied in Bahrain to demonstrate against a raid last week on a top cleric’s home. Shia protesters in the village of Diraz, west of the capital Manama, threw stones at hundreds [...]

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LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

• China takes cautious step toward carbon trading
• Did Israel Attack Syria Again?
• The American Oil & Gas Industry Is Rescuing The Obama Economy
• Americans Exporting More Oil First Time Since ’70s
• 75-Year Pemex Oil Monopoly to End This Year

• India set to overtake China in population
• Tech Talk – A June TWIP and the OPEC MOMR
• Developing Crisis In The Developing World
• Can We Curb Our Addiction to AC?
• Reasons Mexico’s Oil Production Has Stagnated
• Why Oil Prices Are Bound to Stagnate