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This year's fall in energy prices is hastening the decline of big oil, as the seven Western majors sell-off assets, cut investment, return money to shareholders and shrink in size, leaving ever more output to small producers and state firms. Companies that were already deep in the red when the price of Brent was at $109 a barrel last year are having to redraw business plans for prices as low as $90. With promised shareholder dividends probably untouchable for now, they will have to divest, cut costs and borrow more against a smaller business just to make ends meet. And...

A World Bank arbitration tribunal on Thursday ordered Venezuela to pay Exxon Mobil Corp around $1.6 billion to compensate for the 2007 nationalization of its oil projects in the country. The amount is far below the up to $10 billion that Exxon had originally sought and the $6 billion at which the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) capped the case, excluding a tax claim. "The Tribunal has found that the expropriation was conducted in accordance with due process, that it was not carried out contrary to undertakings given to the claimants in this respect and...

Seems Canada is tired of waiting – and waiting – for a decision on the Keystone pipeline and has come up with an alternate plan for moving the oil to market. As Bloomberg reports: It would be Keystone on steroids, more than twice as long and carrying a third more crude. Its end point, a refinery in the blue-collar city of Saint John, New Brunswick, operated by a reclusive Canadian billionaire family, would give Canada’s oil-sands crude supertanker access to the same Louisiana and Texas refineries Keystone was meant to supply. And: … if you’re a fed-up Canadian, like Prime...

In June, as you may recall, the EPA announced their new “Clean Power Plan” which was, for all intents and purposes, another shot across the bow in the war on coal. In their mission statement, while paying lip service to the fact that the needs and resources of each of the states are different, they also cite “the important role of states as full partners with the federal government in cutting pollution.” This is matched with the built in assumption of the need to “address the risks of climate change.” (Apparently nobody bothered to ask the states exactly how...

As if on cue, settled-science believer Auden Schendler delivered a punishing retort in The Aspen Times to my recent column “Inconvenient Truths Denied By Climate Faithful.” Archie Bunker-like in frustration, Schendler wants me to stifle myself. If I don’t “dummy up” like Archie’s wife, Edith, he suggests Aspen Times editors Think Again before publishing my commentary without peer reviews or risk “being complicit in promoting falsehoods.” Schendler calls this “ground-truthing of scientific claims,” noting that the Los Angeles Times doesn’t publish pieces that “deny established climate science.” Like Robert Kennedy Jr., who recently called for the jailing of treasonous nonconformists...

Heating oil and propane expenditures projected to be lower than last winter Autumn arrived in the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic states last week as temperatures turned noticeably colder and snow fell across Wisconsin and Minnesota. Notwithstanding triple-digit temperatures in parts of California, the winter heating season has begun for much of the country, including the Midwest and the Northeast, where heating oil and propane are important heating fuels. Each October, EIA publishes an outlook for winter energy supply, demand, and prices as part of its October Short-Term Energy and Winter Outlook (STEO). EIA projects the retail price of heating oil...

Propane demand (measured as product supplied) is expected to be 100,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) lower on average in 2014 compared to 2013 because of reduced demand from petrochemical plants, according to EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook. In contrast to propane used as a heating fuel in buildings during colder months and as a crop-drying fuel during the harvest season, both of which are highly seasonal and weather dependent, petrochemical consumption of propane has relatively little seasonality. Beginning in mid-2013, higher propane prices reduced demand from petrochemical users. This decline is evident after accounting for the seasonal variation in annual consumption:...

...U.S. fracking boom is getting even bigger with advances in drilling... Each drilling rig in the Eagle Ford shale of south Texas is pumping an average of more than 400 barrels a day than in the dawn of the fracking boom seven years ago, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. The more efficient drilling has helped Texas to more than double its oil production in the past three years, topping three million barrels a day for the first time since the late 1970s. “The productivity of oil and natural gas wells is steadily increasing in many basins across the...

The United States imported more than 7 million barrels per day of crude oil during the first seven months of the year, despite the shale boom, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Crude imports have fallen from a peak of almost 14 million barrels per day in 2006, but they still account for almost half the barrels processed by U.S. refineries. Some observers have expressed unease about lifting the ban on crude exports while the United States continues to rely on imports to meet such a high proportion of its needs. "With regard to the oil export question,...

Crude oil would cost at least a record-setting $150-a-barrel today if not for increased oil production in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. EIA chief Adam Sieminski made the comment in a recent interview with Reuters. Sieminski was appointed by President Barack Obama as EIA Administrator in 2012. “What the EIA Administrator is telling us is without fracking in the United States we’d be paying well over $4-a-gallon for gasoline and our economy would truly be in the tank,” said Daniel Kish, senior vice president of policy at the Institute for Energy Research, a non-profit research...

The EPA is poised to “do an IRS” — similar to what the tax agency had to do with dismissed top official Lois G. Lerner — and officially notify the National Archives that it may have lost key electronic records, according to a think tank that’s suing to get text messages under an open-records request. Justice Department lawyers told a federal court on Tuesday that the alert will be coming soon, in a case that’s shaping up as a significant battle over whether government agencies are required to keep cellphone text messages as “official” records. In this case, researcher Chris...

ABSTRACT New results are presented from an extended experimental investigation of anomalous heat production in a special type of reactor tube operating at high temperatures. The reactor, named E-Cat, is charged with a small amount of hydrogen-loaded nickel powder plus some additives, mainly Lithium. The reaction is primarily initiated by heat from resistor coils around the reactor tube. Measurements of the radiated power from the reactor were performed with high- resolution thermal imaging cameras. The measurements of electrical power input were performed with a large bandwidth three-phase power analyzer. Data were collected during 32 days of running in March 2014....

So you’re the Canadian oil industry and you do what you think is a great thing by developing a mother lode of heavy crude beneath the forests and muskeg of northern Alberta. The plan is to send it clear to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast via a pipeline called Keystone XL. Just a few years back, America desperately wanted that oil. Then one day the politics get sticky. In Nebraska, farmers don’t want the pipeline running through their fields or over their water source. U.S. environmentalists invoke global warming in protesting the project. President Barack Obama keeps siding with...

A copy of the 3rd Party Report has been released and is now posted at the web site Sifferkol.se Link: http://www.sifferkoll.se/sifferkoll/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/LuganoReportSubmit.pdf Key findings: COP of COP of 3.2-3.6 over a 32 day period and isotopic change in nickel and lithium was found to have changed substantially after run. The authors conclude, "Once again, even in the most conservative scenarios, we have values that allow us to conclude that the reactor studied here may not be considered a conventional source of energy." UPDATE: From Rossi on the Journal of Nuclear Physics: To all the Readers of the Journal of Nuclear Physics:...

    Shell testing new laser-based sensor to find shale gas Posted on October 7, 2014 at 4:18 pm by Ryan Holeywell in General, Technology WellDog CEO John Pope, right, and Art Toews, gas testing technology specialist, hold a device that uses lasers to help identify shale gas reservoirs (Ryan Holeywell/Houston Chronicle) HOUSTON – Royal Dutch Shell is testing a new device that uses lasers to help identify shale gas reservoirs, Wyoming-based oilfield service company WellDog announced Tuesday.The device, which weights more than 100 pounds, is dropped into a wellbore where it shoots lasers and measures the frequency at which...

The surge of new construction projects in the petrochemical corridor east of Houston is pumping millions into local economies and adding thousands of new jobs, but also clogging area roadways and sending companies scrambling to find enough skilled workers. As chemical plants rush to take advantage of the cheap, abundant natural gas unleashed by the U.S. shale boom, industry and local communities like Baytown and Mont Belvieu have been forced to strike a delicate balancing act between embracing the flurry of new construction activity while maintaining good quality of life for residents. “We have problems 99 percent of the country...

The European Commission on Tuesday proposed scrapping a mandatory requirement to label tar sands oil as highly polluting after years of industry opposition. The new proposal abandons one obstacle to Canada shipping crude from tar sands to Europe and is likely to draw strong criticism from environmental campaigners and Green politicians. It is suggested in a revised draft law on how refiners report the carbon intensity of the fuel they supply. The debate about labelling tar sands, also known as oil sands, dates back to 2009 when EU member states approved legislation with the aim of cutting greenhouse gases from...

Cadillac sales continue to sputter at General Motors. In fact, the brand is the only make at GM that has seen a year over year sales decline for the period ending in September at a time when the auto industry was booming. Specifically, Cadillac has logged in 127,837 sales for the first nine months of 2014 compared to 133,414 in 2013 for a sales decline of 4.2 percent. GM will now offer frequent flyer miles to help spur sales at the division. The marketing move at GM follows a decision to relocate Cadillac's sales team to New York City....

The U.S. Energy Information Administration trimmed its forecast of world oil demand growth next year and made even deeper cuts in its outlook for OPEC production, the latest signs of a shift toward surplus supplies next year. The EIA cut its 2014 global demand forecast to 91.47 million barrels a day, compared with 91.55 million bpd expected last month, according to a monthly report from the agency on Tuesday. As a result, it now expects consumption to rise by 1.24 million bpd, down 100,000 bpd from the previous month's report but still higher than the 1 mln bpd increase estimated...

Carla Restivo, 61, is a drilling fluids technician working in Colorado for Sugar Land-based Hydro Resources. Oil and gas drillers pump lubricating liquid — known in the industry slang as “mud” — to their drill bits to help them move through layers of rock. Fluids technicians like Restivo help monitor and manage the type of mud that’s used in different phases of drilling process. Restivo started her career as a roughneck in 1976. That makes her relatively unique in the oil and gas industry, where, according to the American Petroleum Institute, fewer than 5 percent of blue collar jobs are...