Steve Levine

A mountain-top take on the “flood of oil supply”

If Montana is a microcosm of the world, one message to glean is that we are not in the midst of a decades-long flood of oil supply in the United States, as many suggest. Instead, the red lights are blinking across the exuberant U.S. oil patch.

July 30, 2012

The politics of drilling in the dark zone

The Northbelt Thrust falls into a curious category on the global oil patch. Like dark matter in the universe, it is a blank spot, one of a few places with big proven and potential reserves that are wholly ignored in official forecasts. For it is offshore from Cuba, a political pariah in the U.S.

April 19, 2012

Sudan, Saudi and the cheering on the U.S. oil patch

Consider the latest news from the Middle East and North Africa, and one grasps why many U.S. oil and geopolitical analysts are cheering what they see as a prospect that the country will seriously trim its oil imports.

February 15, 2012

Oil and geopolitics: a turbulent year, and no end in sight

Kazakhstan is moving fast to pacify its restive west as a new video circulates in which police shoot and beat retreating oil workers protesting labor conditions. Two reasons: With parliamentary elections three weeks away, President Nursultan Nazarbayev (pictured above) wants to stamp out any political narrative conflicting with his long-time assertion of keeping Kazakhstan stable. Abroad, the jittery global oil market is already starting to factor in a possible disruption of Kazakhstan’s 1.5 million barrels a day of oil exports

December 22, 2011

How big is Exxon’s gamble in Kurdistan? (Answer: BIG)

Has ExxonMobil — the annoyingly prissy schoolboy who always obeys the teacher — risked weakening one of its distinguishing pillars in order to break into a single oil patch? And if so, could that shake up the global oil market along with geopolitics?

We are referring to the news, indiscreetly disclosed by a Kurdistan official last week, that the northern Iraqi region has signed an oil exploration agreement with Exxon. The reason this is a problem is that Kurdistan has been in a long-standing turf war with the folks in Baghdad over how to divide the spoils from its hydrocarbon riches.

November 26, 2011

Is this group think, or is the U.S. about to be energy-independent?

One becomes nervous when a consensus begins to form around a Big New Idea — it starts to sound like group think. So what are we to make of the cottage industry developing around the notion that the U.S. not only isn’t facing an impending oil shortage — it is on the cusp of being nearly energy independent, short of a margin of barrels that will be imported from friendly Canada and Mexico?

November 1, 2011

Load More

Leave a Comment