Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Proved reserves of natural gas increased for the fifth year in a row, according to “Advance Summary: U.S. Crude Oil, Natural Gas, and Natural Gas Liquids Reserves 2003 Annual Report” released today by the Energy Information Administration. U.S. natural gas reserves increased by 1 percent in 2003.
OIL giant Royal Dutch/Shell has announced plans to invest £8 billion a year over the next two years to boost its reserves and production, as it tries to move on from the reserves scandal that rocked the company earlier this year
Testifying before a House Small Business subcommittee on behalf of the American Farm Bureau Federation, Missouri farmer Hal Swaney said increased energy costs over the 2003 through 2004 growing season have cost farmers more than $6 billion in added expenses to produce the food and fiber for this country.
Almost anytime is a good time for Alan Greenspan and other presidents or directors of central banks in Europe and Japan to remind the faithful that “extreme oil prices” act as a kind of energy tax, and in official central banker mythology ‘can only reduce economic growth,’ and of course raise inflation.
A Man-Made rainforest that should have taken millennia to evolve has baffled scientists by springing up in just 150 years.
The dearth of oil and the corresponding need to ensure adequate supply amidst burgeoning demand is viewed as a matter of economic survival. Supply/demand dynamics therefore will fuel America’s hegemonistic impulse and heighten the very geopolitical uncertainties which have given rise to this alleged political risk premium in the oil markets.
A retired Irish geologist is at the center of a small, but suddenly influential, band of contrarians known as the peak-oil movement, which believes that by as early as next year, humanity will have burned through half the oil it will ever get, and that the era of cheap oil is over.
Fuelling world prices, China’s crude oil imports jumped 37.4 per cent in August from the same month a year earlier to 9.33 million metric tons (70 million barrels), the government reports.
German Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin recently inaugurated a large solar-powered energy plant in the eastern city of Espenhain, noting that Germany is the leading European country to install solar energy facilities.
Cherrapunjee, in the northeastern state of Meghalaya (the “Land of Clouds”), is a “wet desert”, and a case study in environmental degradation, deforestation and resource mismanagement.
Glaciers in Antarctica’s most rapidly warming region have quickened their pace following the collapse of a Delaware-sized ice shelf in March 2002, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder and a related study by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Beijing is pushing the Russian government to intervene to get Russia’s top oil exporter to continue all its shipments to China. The Russian company Yukos says it will stop crude oil deliveries next week because it cannot afford the shipping costs.
