Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As the Russian government moves to reassert its sway over
the country’s lucrative energy business, the British oil and gas
giant BP would seem to be an obvious target. The company’s 50-50
Russian venture, called TNK-BP, is posting record profits, and now
pumps one of every five barrels of BP’s worldwide oil supply.
MEXICO CITY — While record-high oil prices have filled the coffers of Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, experts say the good times mask a looming problem in the country’s energy sector.
The Cantarell oil field in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico’s biggest, is running low. Exactly when it will run out, nobody knows.
ROYAL Dutch/Shell yesterday raised fears that it may have to write down its reserves by more than 1.5 billion barrels — 10 per cent of its total reserves — after the Anglo-Dutch oil company admitted that it was considering its fifth “volume adjustment” this year.
While Delta, like other airlines, cut about $600 million in costs between 2001 and 2003, its fuel costs at the same time went up by about $120 million. Given that oil prices have increased by roughly three-quarters in a year, the fuel expense for 2004 will be much worse.
“I think it is not helpful for the world to believe that we are running out of oil.” LORD BROWNE, BP chief executive
Despite RBI Governor Dr Y.V. Reddy putting on a brave front on Tuesday saying that the Indian economy is resilient enough to absorb the oil shock, it is now clear that the ogre of petro inflation will adversely impact India’s growth prospects.
Iran’s Ambassador to Beijing Fereydoun Verdinejad said here Wednesday that Iran and China enjoy great potentials to boost long-term cooperation in various oil, gas and petrochemistry fields.
Some traders are handicapping the possibility of the U.S. tapping the Strategic Oil Supply. With one week to go before the election, and with long-term problems now being fully catalogued, the scenario becomes possible. The United State’s supply of oil is in tatters due to underwater mudslides caused by Hurricane Ivan.
New Zealand is not preparing for the petroleum energy decline because, like most governments, it relies on the speculative theoretical forecasts produced by (non-geologist) economists of the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Total output rose 1 percent to the equivalent of 3.91 million barrels of oil a day as Chief Executive Officer Lee R. Raymond added production from the $3.4 billion Kizomba A project in deep waters off the coast of Angola. Other projects began producing in the past year in the North Sea and off Equatorial Guinea.
The impact of new projects was almost outweighed by a 14 percent drop in U.S. gas output, asset sales and production- sharing contracts under which the company gets fewer barrels of crude from certain fields as prices rise.
Motorists may groan, but the times of $2-a-gallon gasoline could look like the good old days before the decade is over. The problem is that global demand for oil is rising briskly, and at the same time, production in old oil fields is declining and new fields are increasingly hard to find.
Talks and presentations delivered at a session of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) on dwindling oil supplies.
