Free Republic

In a rather unconventional warning, Continental Resources chief executive Harold Hamm said on Wednesday that should the U.S. oil industry embark on another spending spree, it could “kill” the market. Speaking at the CERAWeek conference in Houston – one of the largest gatherings of oil executives and ministers, including this year Saudi Arabia’s oil minister Khalid Al-Falih – Hamm said that U.S. crude oil output “could go pretty high”. But Hamm was quick to add, as quoted by Bloomberg: “But it’s going to have to be done in a measured way, or else we kill the market.”

The Department of the Interior will include “all available” federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico that have not already been leased out for offshore oil drilling. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced Monday 73 million acres off the coast of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida would be offered at a lease sale in August as part of the Interior Department’s five-year leasing plan. “Opening more federal lands and waters to oil and gas drilling is a pillar of President Trump’s plan to make the United States energy independent,” Zinke said in a statement. Interior finalized its current five-year offshore...

President Trump on Monday hailed oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp.’s announcement of a major jobs and manufacturing plan for Texas and Louisiana. Exxon said it has embarked on a $20 billion plan to build or update manufacturing and refining facilities on the Gulf Coast, something the company predicts will create 45,000 news jobs. In a statement, Trump said that is “is exactly the kind of investment, economic development and job creation that will help put Americans back to work.” “Many of the products that will be manufactured here in the United States by American workers will be exported to other...

Oil is more plentiful than you can imagine. And we keep figuring out easier and more economical ways to get it out of the ground. In 1938, the famous geologist M. King Hubbert came up with the concept of peak oil, which is defined as having extracted half of the recoverable, conventional oil reserves. After that, oil production declines and cannot keep up with growing demand as the population continues to rise. In Hubbert’s time, most of the conventional oil reserves had already been discovered. Hubbert went on to predict that U.S. production would peak in 1969, and it did...

Headline you don't see too many places: U.S. oil exports are blowing past expectations That's from Mike Allen's pretty good new news site, Axios, which is fast becoming one of my favorites. The U.S. is blowing away OPEC and other petrotyrant states with a stunning upsurge in oil sales abroad. Up until December 2015, oil exports weren't even legal from the states. Thirteen months later, we are conquering the market and becoming the Big Dog through our energy companies' rising production, eclipsing every petrotyrant this side of Hugo Chavez. Get a load of the chart from Forbes. Which reminds...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Former U.S. Sen. Frank Murkowski in 2001 gave a speech urging colleagues to approve oil drilling in America's largest wildlife refuge. The Alaska Republican held up a blank sheet of paper to illustrate his point. The field of white, he said, was all you could see each winter on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, implying that such a barren landscape would not be harmed by oil rigs. Sixteen years later, Murkowski's daughter is trying again. U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is sponsoring legislation to open the refuge that takes up Alaska's northeast corner...

Two years ago, when Saudi Arabia launched an unprecedented campaign to crush high-cost oil producers, in the process effectively putting an end to the OPEC cartel (at least until last year's attempt to cut production), it made a bold bet that U.S. shale producers would be swept under when the price of oil tumbled, leading to a tsunami of bankruptcies, as well as investment and production halts. To an extent it succeeded, but where it may have made a glaring error is the core assumption about shale breakeven costs, which as we reported throughout 2016, were substantially lower than consensus...

Climate Change: U.S. output of so-called greenhouse gases continues to decline, a new report shows. Even so, global warming activists are likely to be disappointed. The drop has nothing to do with their pet cause, alternative energy. That's right. The Environmental Protection Agency's yearly greenhouse gas emissions report noted that after rising slightly in 2013 and 2014, greenhouse gas output fell in 2015 — the most recent full year for which data are available. OK, but maybe it was a one-year fluke? Hardly. First off, the drop was significant in size — 2.2% on an annual basis, far too big...

RUSH: Hey, in the midst of all of this, Trump just signed his first bill today, first piece of legislation. You know what it does? I was watching CNN. They’re just livid. CNN is reporting that Trump’s bill that he signed weakens oil and gas and mining regulations. And you should have seen them when they announced this. They’re just shaking their heads, “Oh, my God.” And what they’re shaking their heads about is he won’t stop. We can’t make him stop! We thought we had him paralyzed with Flynn, he just keeps doing it. And that’s what’s gonna continue...

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) made its largest lease sale in four years, marking the start of President Donald Trump’s plans to expand drilling on federal lands. BLM sold drilling rights on 278 parcels of public land for $129.3 million. Bids ranged from $2 per acre to $16,500 per acre. The land sold was mostly located in Wyoming — about half of which is directly controlled by the federal government.

We’re on the verge of a new energy revolution. Except it’s the exact opposite of the one the “experts” at places like BP, the International Energy Agency and – ahem – the Guardian are predicting. For years we’ve been assured by politicians, energy industry specialists and green advocates that renewables such as wind and solar are getting more and more cost-competitive while dirty fossil fuels are so discredited and wrong and evil we’ll soon have to leave them in the ground. But to believe this you’d have to believe in a world where Donald Trump and Brexit hadn’t happened; where...

His first week in office is proving U.S. president Donald Trump to be, if nothing else, true to his word in acting upon campaign promises, and Goldman Sachs believes the brash billionaire's proposed tax reforms may result in a 25 percent upward surge of West Texas Intermediate futures. This in turn could trigger large-scale domestic oil production, according to Goldman analysts, referring to the outcome of the push by House of Representative Republicans for a shift to border-adjusted corporate tax (BTA), whereby imports into the States would be taxed but U.S. business export revenues would be exempt from corporate taxation....

Data from the last seismic survey done in the ANWR in the early 1980s suggest the region potentially contains some ten billion barrels of recoverable oil, says Houseknecht—enough to meet U.S. demand for about a year and a half. But the uncertainty is large. In 2002, estimates of the recoverable oil in the vast National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA), to the west of Prudhoe Bay, were also more than ten billion barrels. That estimate fell by 90 percent in 2010 after exploratory wells found mostly gas. What Obama's Drilling Bans Mean for Alaska and the Arctic

President Donald Trump is taking his ‘America First’ energy plan from the campaign trail to the White House website, vowing to achieve energy independence from OPEC and any nations hostile to U.S. interests. Trump is not the first U.S. President to have promised energy independence. At the height of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, Richard Nixon suggested a project to ensure that by the end of the 1970s, “Americans will not have to rely on any source of energy beyond our own”. More than 40 years later, America continues to rely on foreign oil imports, and is a large importer...

The combination of the Obama administration’s intransigence in approving the Keystone XL pipeline and the exponential explosion in the production of crude oil, especially from the Bakken formation in North Dakota, has put increasing pressure on alternative modes of transportation to get that crude to refineries and customers. But with the increasing use of alternative modes such as barges, railcars, and over-the-road tanker trucks has come a growing concern about safety.A series of rail accidents over the last several years has caught the attention of the Department of Transportation, and CNBC has tried its best to question the viability of...

Drill baby drill . . . and transport it too. If you had issues with Donald Trump, but you figured he might be worth rolling the dice if there was the hope of four or five things good things happening, what might have been on your list? The Supreme Court, certainly. The ObamaCare repeal, absolutely. For me, one of the issues close to the top as well was energy independence. And that doesn’t only include drilling for domestic resources. Most people don’t realize what a big problem transport infrastructure is, and the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines were supposed...

January 24, 2017 It is just day two of his presidency, and already Trump is taking a sledgehammer to the Obama legacy: in his latest move reported moments ago by Bloomberg, president Trump intends to sign two executive actions today "that would advance construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines", putting a spoke, so to say, in the train wheels of Warren Buffett's train-based oil transportation quasi-monopoly. Keystone was rejected under former President Barack Obama. Trump’s move on Energy Transfer Partners LP’s 1,172-mile Dakota Access project aims to end a standoff that has stalled the $3.8 billion project...

US President Donald Trump has pledged to unlock a $US50 trillion ($66 trillion) shale oil and gas revolution and boost development of low emissions coal technology for electricity. The Energy First plan was outlined as the top priority in President Trump’s first action statement after being sworn into office. The statement committed Trump to scrapping the Obama government’s Climate Action Plan but did not mention renewable energy or whether the US would remain in the Paris agreement. It was a full endorsement of the future use of fossil fuels. The Trump plan mirrors debate in Australia over energy security. The...

A leading Wall Street investment expert claims that Donald Trump could make the US a world leading “energy powerhouse” during his presidency. Joseph Grinkorn, chief executive officer of Morris Group, believes the presidential elect could force global oil prices as low as $25 dollars a barrel by tapping into America’s reserves. Mr Grinkhorn, a New York-base entrepreneur that specialises in finance, claims that the Republican’s first 100 days in office could be a “game changer” for the global energy industry. Both OPEC and non-OPEC member countries have already agreed to cut production for the first six months of this year...

If you watched the late Bob Munden when he did his quick draw and shooting from the hip, it was amazing to watch. What's really kind of neat is that this type of shooting is similar to what law enforcement term “retention shooting”. Retention shooting was taught to the officers when they had to pull the weapon out and fire while in close proximity to a suspect. The history of it goes back to the early 1900's taught by William E Fairbairn the author of several tactical shooting books. Fast forward to modern day, the person in this video blasting...