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.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank believe that, after 2008, almost half the opportunities for oil companies will be in LNG, GTL and the Venezuelan and Canadian oil sands, with deep water projects making up another quarter of the expected openings. But oil companies diverge on the need to get into such projects.
Oil prices hit a one month-high of $47 a barrel on Tuesday as China showed no let-up in its strong import growth and traders worried that U.S. petroleum inventories had drawn down heavily due to Hurricane Ivan.
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.
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.
A terrorist attack on an LNG tanker “would have the force of a small nuclear explosion,” according to the chairman of Lloyd’s, a British insurer of natural gas port facilities like the ones being proposed in Fall River and Providence.
Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute have come up with a proposal to save American capitalism from the end of the age of oil.
The experts are calling for energy reforms. Why aren’t the politicians?
