Free Republic

The of oil is down, from $53 on 7 March, to a bit above $48 today. This, going into the summer driving season.

Last month, the House passed legislation that would repeal new controls on natural gas production installed in the waning days of the Obama administration. It's now up to the Senate to pass a companion bill and help make the repeal official. Sens. Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner ought to lead the way; left unaltered, these controls will crush local energy firms and destroy local jobs. Excessive regulations keep gas production on federal lands artificially low. Firms have to navigate lengthy, hugely expensive approval channels to get the green light. As a result, while gas production on private and state territories...

Anadarko Petroleum Corp., one of Colorado’s biggest oil and gas companies, on Tuesday said it would pour about $840 million this year into its operations in the state’s Denver-Julesburg (DJ) Basin, which sprawls north and east of Denver to the state line. The company (NYSE: APC), which has been working in the DJ basin for years, also boosted the amount of oil, natural gas and liquids it expects to pull from the basin by about 33 percent — to more than 2 billion barrels of oil equivalent, at least. As part of its annual announcement about capital investment for the...

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...

Households in New England paid electricity prices last month that were 47 percent higher than the national average.. Consumer energy information released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for its Boston region showed the area's households paid an average of 19.5 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity, compared to the national average of 13.3 cents. The region includes Hampden and Worcester counties as well as Greater Boston and parts of New Hampshire, Connecticut and Maine. The figures came out one day after energy utility Eversource proposed a 10 percent increase in its electricity distribution rates beginning early next year. The...

A team of engineers led by 94-year-old John Goodenough, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery, has developed the first all-solid-state battery cells that could lead to safer, faster-charging, longer-lasting rechargeable batteries for handheld mobile devices, electric cars and stationary energy storage. Goodenough’s latest breakthrough, completed with Cockrell School senior research fellow Maria Helena Braga, is a low-cost all-solid-state battery that is noncombustible and has a long cycle life (battery life) with a high volumetric energy density and fast rates of charge and discharge. The engineers describe...

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...

Wise County, Virginia –  A long-awaited revival is under way in this beleaguered Central Appalachia community where residents see coal as the once and future king. Trucks are running again. Miners working seven days a week cannot keep up with current demand. Coal mines, long dormant after the industry’s collapse, are now buzzing again with antlike activity. “We load coal every day for the power plant in Virginia City,” explained Rick, a long-time supervisor for a major local operation who did not want to give his last name. “There's one shipment a week for Georgia Power, and one for Tennessee...

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...

SANTA FE — Opposition to the shale oil extraction process known as fracking is growing, particularly among minorities, threatening the political viability of the oil industry in New Mexico, an oil and gas industry expert told state lawmakers Thursday. Claire Chase, the government affairs director for Mack Energy of Artesia, said while state government is heavily reliant on oil revenues, New Mexico is the most vulnerable state in the nation to increasing opposition to fracking and fossil fuels in general. She said a new culture of protests and activism has the oil and gas industry in its sights. Chase said...

The risk of running out of rare earth metals that are essential to modern technology has led to a surge in interest in mining the deep seas. But fears have also mounted about the environmental impact of disturbing vast areas of the pristine ocean floor, experts at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Boston said. Demographic growth and the acceleration of technological innovations over the past 40 years have doubled the quantity of minerals extracted worldwide, leading to shortages of certain key metals, according to a recent U.N. report. “Mining is essential for modern life,”...

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The announcement Thursday that the partners of the Leviathan gas reservoir will invest $3.75 billion in its development is a devastating blow to the BDS movement, Eli Groner, director-general of the Prime Minister's Office, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. The development of Leviathan, which is scheduled to take about three years, constitutes both the largest energy project and financial investment in Israel in the country's history.

Environmental hypocrites who were protesting against the Dakota Access oil pipeline, burned oil to keep themselves warm! They also left enough litter to fill more than 250 garbage trucks! Environmental hypocrites who were protesting against the Dakota Access oil pipeline, burned oil to keep themselves warm!They also left enough litter to fill more than 250 garbage trucks!Fox News writes of this: (the bolding is mine)What was once a bustling makeshift city is now a largely abandoned garbage pit. Teepees and yurts, thousands of sheets of plywood and tents, kerosene and propane stoves, diesel and gasoline generators, food, clothing, cars and mountains...

CANNON BALL, N.D – After seven months of protests, beating drums, freezing nights and canned chili, police shut down campsites once occupied by tens of thousands of environmentalists and Native Americans fighting the North Dakota Access Pipeline project. At least one person was injured Wednesday after protesters set fire to a handful of wooden structures at the makeshift campsite. Cecily Fong, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Emergency Services, says the extent of the unidentified female's injuries weren't known. Fong said an ambulance was being sent to the encampment. Most of the 200 to 300 protesters who remained at...

The Dakota Access Pipeline protesters are being forced to abandon their camp today, and rather than allow the site to be properly cleaned up, they have decided to light it on fire Burning sections of the camp will most likely make a sanitary and efficient cleanup more difficult for the authorities, which have repeatedly clashed with protesters over the camp’s threat to the environment. An even bigger reason many in the Standing Rock tribe won’t be sorry to see visiting agitators go: The pipeline protest has been detrimental to their most important source of revenue, the Prairie Knights Casino &...

On the eve of the deadline for anti-Dakota Access Pipeline protesters to vacate camps in North Dakota, the company in charge of construction said in a court filing on Tuesday that oil could start flowing in as early as two weeks, beating previous estimates. Texas-based developer Energy Transfer Partners, the builder of the pipeline whose construction has sparked protests since last August over its location, said in the filing to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that the company "estimates and targets that the pipeline will be complete and ready to flow oil anywhere between the week of March...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened Wells Fargo bank for its investment in the North Dakota Access Pipeline. In a February 17 letter to Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan, de Blasio said he wanted to “express my deep concern about your involvement, and the involvement of other banks, in financing the Dakota Access Pipeline,” noting his concern is partly based on being a Mayor of a “coastal city threatened by climate change.” De Blasio claimed the pipeline would violate “human and tribal rights of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation” and would have “negative environmental consequences” to the land...

I am a petroleum geologist/geophysicist with about 36 years of experience in oil & gas exploration mostly in the Gulf of Mexico. In light of Andy May’s recent post, Oil – Will we run out?, I thought I might post an essay on oil formation. Over the past six years, I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to write guest posts for Watts Up With That thanks to Anthony Watts. Many of my posts have been about issues related to oil production and each of these posts usually triggers comments from Abiogenic Oil advocates. So, this post’s main thrust...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/02/17/trump-executive-orders-elite-popular-polls-muslim-ban-immigration-column/97920456/