Free Republic

Falling oil prices have some Texas lawmakers looking to reshape U.S. policy on crude oil in the mold of another iconic Texas product: Blue Bell Ice Cream. Blue Bell’s motto is “We eat all we can, and we sell the rest.” Texas legislators think that should also apply to oil by lifting the ban on crude oil exports — a policy that’s been in place since the oil crisis of the 1970s. A drop in the price of crude, from about $100 in mid-2014 to around $50 now, has threatened to halt the recent boom in U.S. oil production. The...

The U.S. Congress is nearing final approval of a bill that would green light the Keystone XL pipeline. But with the President set to veto the legislation when it reaches his desk, the ability of companies in Alberta to get their tar sands oil out of the country looks highly uncertain. With a southern route through Keystone XL potentially blocked, there have been alternative routes east and west. Enbridge has proposed the Northern Gateway pipeline, which would travel to British Columbia’s Pacific coast, but that has faced stiff environmental opposition from provincial residents and indigenous groups. TransCanada is also pushing...

Facing increased pressure from rail cutting into its business, while the Keystone XL pipeline remains under unending American review, TransCanada Corp. said it is planning to diversify into the oil-by-rail business within months, improving its customers’ ability to connect to its sprawling North American pipeline and storage network. “We are approaching 1.2 million barrels per day of [rail-] loading capacity — nobody has waited for Keystone XL pipeline to get built,” Russ Girling, president and CEO of the Calgary-based pipeline operator, said Wednesday following a speech to a business audience in Toronto. “Depending on our conversations [with customers], we will...

The United Steelworkers union is broadening its nationwide walkout to include two more refineries. Early Sunday, the union is planning to go on strike against two BP facilities in the Midwest, union spokeswoman Lynne Hancock confirmed. That will bring the total number of plants on strike to 11, after union members walked out of nine facilities, including five in the Houston area, a week ago. The latest work stoppages are scheduled to begin 12:01 a.m. Sunday at BP’s refineries in Toledo, Ohio and Whiting, Ind., Hancock said. BP issued a statement saying it is disappointed the union is launching a...

Another 8,000 oil jobs are about to evaporate, a major oil-tool supplier said Thursday, deepening the industry's wounds even as U.S. crude has regained some ground from its steep price slump. Weatherford International's 15 percent job cut brings the tally of layoffs by the world's four biggest oil field services companies to 25,000 in recent weeks - a bigger number in a shorter time than in oil downturns of the past. More are expected if oil remains cheap at $50 a barrel. Weatherford CEO Bernard Duroc-Danner promised investors that the company, incorporated in Ireland with its main U.S. offices in...

New information from the federal government suggests workers’ interest in unions continues to fall, with union membership reaching its lowest rate in 100 years. According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today, the union membership rate fell to 11.1 percent, with just 14.6 million wage and salaried workers maintaining membership. In 2013, the union membership rate was 0.2 percentage points higher, at 11.3 percent. The rate of union membership has been on a steady decline over the past three decades. It grew slightly from 12.1 percent in 2007 to 12.4 percent in 2008. During President Obama’s first...

An interesting conclusion can be drawn from the numbers presented by the EIA this week. It appears that only three fourths of the increase in production of crude and natural gas liquids produced by the US industry last year were actually consumed. More than a fourth of this production had to be sent to storage because it could not be sold into the market. Here are the numbers: Crude Production up 1.1 MMB/D, NGL Production up 0.4 MMB/D, Inventory Build 0.4 MMB/D, or 27% of total production increase. The fact that all of the increased production did not find a...

Siemens AG on Friday said it would cut more than 2% of its workforce around the world as part of an aggressive plan to overhaul the business. The company will trim 7,800 jobs globally, of which 3,300 are expected in Germany, after the management and labor council met Thursday. The job cuts will be mainly among administrative and overhead employees, Siemens said. The staff reductions, which will be completed within two years, will cost Siemens in mid- to high-three-digit range in millions of euros, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. The cost includes previously announced...

Fires at the site of an eastern Iowa freight train derailment are out but ethanol is leaking into the Mississippi River and the task turned to monitoring for environmental impact and offloading the fuel from derailed trains to empty cars. The cars went off the tracks at 11:20 a.m. Wednesday in a remote area about 10 miles north of Dubuque. Local authorities say three cars caught fire.....

...Some governments have moved already to shore up their revenues by raising gasoline taxes or cutting fuel subsidies. At the same time, falling oil costs have pumped up deflation fears across Europe and Japan, adding to the risk that consumers and businesses will hold back on spending and investment, dragging on growth. China has raised fuel-consumption taxes by 50% since November. Gasoline prices have soared in Indonesia as the authorities eliminated subsidies altogether. High taxes in Japan mean pump prices have fallen only 15% in the past six months, compared with a 40% decline in the U.S. Taxes also blunt...

A Houston-based company that makes piping and casing for oil and gas drilling has postponed plans to build a manufacturing plant in northeast Nebraska. Tejas Tubular Products President Maximo Tejeda told the Norfolk Daily News that he remains committed to building a mill next to Nucor Steel in Norfolk....

A tanker offloaded enough liquefied natural gas at Boston Harbor last week to heat 30,000 homes for a year, bolstering New England’s tight pipeline capacity just as a new wave of below-average temperatures threatens to strain energy supplies. But some advocates say this strategic slug of LNG during the coldest days of the winter can do more: It may help lower wholesale power prices from Connecticut to Maine, helping to hold down the cost of electricity for homeowners and businesses. That’s a debatable claim, but it highlights the intensifying dispute over whether New England power customers should spend billions of...

Oil prices continued their rally Tuesday as investors bet that a sharp decline in U.S. drilling activity will balance the oversupplied global market, and even as analysts cautioned that the rebound in prices may not prove to be sustainable. Front-month Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, rose 3.7% to be at $56.80 a barrel on London’s ICE futures exchange. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in March recently traded at $51.15 a barrel, up more than 3% from Monday’s settlement. Both the global oil benchmarks have gained more than 11% over the past three...

IA conducts a survey of gasoline prices each Monday, and yesterday's survey showed the U.S. average regular retail gasoline price increasing for the first time in 18 weeks. The steady decline in prices over the previous 17 weeks was the longest consecutive decrease in EIA's weekly survey since prices fell 14 cents per gallon over a 24-week period in 1995. The decline is the largest percentage decline since a 58% drop in gasoline prices over 15 weeks in late 2008. With oil prices at around $45 per barrel (bbl), petroleum refinery outages in the Midwest and Gulf Coast regions in...

In fact, the USW enjoys the right to pick which company will head up negotiations and specifically chose Shell this year for its perceived flexibility. Shell forged deals with the union in 2006, 2009 and 2012. Those contracts were considered successes, especially after a months-long walkout in 1980, a time people still talk about as a low point for disputes in the sector. This year, however, was different. John Abbott took over as Shell's refining chief in 2013 and Ben van Beurden became chief executive officer in 2014. This time, there were new faces on the negotiating team from Shell,...

More layoffs have hit the Texas oil field services industry. Industrial conglomerate GE notified state regulators last week it will lay off 330 employees in the East Texas manufacturing operations it acquired from oil-field pump maker Lufkin Industries. It’s the latest sign the collapse of petroleum prices is forcing oil companies to jettison workers and adjust to much leaner profits. The U.S. benchmark oil price has halved since June. In a letter to the Texas Workforce Commission disclosed Monday, GE said it is cutting 45 percent of the manufacturing, sales, engineering and other jobs at its Buck Creek plant starting...

Steelworker strikes that began Sunday at seven U.S. oil refineries and two chemical plants have a slim chance of pumping up gasoline or crude prices dramatically in the near future, analysts say. Talks between the United Steelworkers union and big oil companies led by Royal Dutch Shell broke down Saturday after the two groups couldn’t reach an agreement on – among other contractual issues – the overtime that workers have to take when others are called away to train new recruits, a point “when the fatigue sets in,” union spokeswoman Lynn Hancock said. But the refineries, analysts said, can keep...

Mary Noriega heard there would be chicken. She hated being herded “like cattle,” she said, standing for hours in a line of more than 1,500 people hoping to buy food, as soldiers with side arms checked identification cards to make sure no one tried to buy basic items more than once or twice a week. But Ms. Noriega, a laboratory assistant with three children, said she had no choice, ticking off the inventory in her depleted refrigerator: coffee and corn flour. Things had gotten so bad, she said, that she had begun bartering with neighbors to put food on the...

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has published a final environmental impact statement for the agency’s conservation plan for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In that EIS the agency has selected a plan alternative that recommends that Congress should designate the entire refuge as wilderness, (see map page 23) including the coastal plain area, sometimes known as the 1002 area. This wilderness designation would place the entire refuge off limits for oil and gas exploration and development. Land in the immediate vicinity of the coastal village of Kaktovik would be excluded from the wilderness designation but would still require Congressional...

Before the start of the 2014 NFL regular season, University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona, home to Super Bowl XLIX, retrofitted 312 high-performance light-emitting diode (LED) stadium light fixtures. The LED fixtures replaced more than 780 metal halide high-intensity discharge (HID) fixtures and will illuminate the field during the Super Bowl on February 1. University of Phoenix Stadium was the first stadium in the NFL to light its playing field using only LEDs. The new lights draw approximately 310 kilowatts of energy compared with the 1,240 kilowatts required by the old system, a savings of about 75%. Assuming an electricity...