Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It will not come as news to anyone that the US dominates the world economically and militarily. But the exact mechanisms by which American hegemony has been established and maintained are perhaps less well understood than they might be. One tool used to great effect has been the dollar, but its efficacy has recently been under threat since Europe introduced the euro.
The row over the intrusion into Japanese waters of one of China’s nuclear submarines is the latest in a long series of awkward moments in the fraught relationship between Asia’s two most powerful nations.
It’s too early to celebrate the recent decline in oil prices after they topped $55 a barrel. None of the reasons that created the price spike — the strong thirst for crude in China and India, the dismemberment of the Russian oil giant Yukos, the terror strikes against oil facilities in the Middle East — has gone away.
Russian oil companies are less interested in unexplored deposits and are not drilling new wells.
The US Interior Department on Friday gave final approval to a plan by ConocoPhillips and partner Anadarko Petroleum Corp. to develop five tracts around the oil-rich Alpine field on Alaska’s North Slope.
SABOTEURS have set fire to four oil wells in Iraq’s northern fields.
Successive explosions had rocked the four wells in Khabbaza, 20km northwest of Kirkuk, the state-run Northern Oil Co said today.
China, the world’s second-largest consumer of oil after the United States, has plenty of cash to secure sources of petroleum and natural gas. But as aggressively as any nation, it is also cutting deals and forging alliances to get the energy it needs.
China, the world’s second-largest consumer of oil after the United States, has plenty of cash to secure sources of petroleum and natural gas. But as aggressively as any nation, it is also cutting deals and forging alliances to get the energy it needs.
Russia’s economic gold reserves will be exhausted in 2011, Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev said at a government meeting. According to Mr Trutnev, commercially exploitable reserves of some minerals are close to exhaustion. In particular, he said the country’s exploitable reserves of oil, uranium, copper and vein gold would be exhausted in 2015.
A lack of spare oil tankers and an increase in OPEC production are driving shipping rates to records, said Morten Arntzen, CEO of Overseas Shipholding Group, the largest U.S.-based oil tanker owner.
A team of market forecasters that correctly predicted the oil bust of the 1980s thinks history will not repeat itself, at least for now. “I think the real key is the peaking of world oil production,” said Groppe, a partner with Groppe, Long & Littell, who has consulted the industry for a half century.
Low heating fuel stocks in all major consuming regions could reverse oil’s slide from record highs, as refiners struggle to build a supply cushion for peak winter demand.
