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One of the worst things you can call a liberal, especially one running for president, is a fracker. And that is exactly what Mother Jones called Hillary Clinton when it accused her of strongly supporting fracking in other countries while she was Secretary of State. It will be interesting to see how Hillary will react to the fracking charges since it could make her anathema to the liberal base whose support she needs to win the Democrat nomination for president. It is a long detailed article but here are some highlights from How Hillary Clinton's State Department Sold Fracking to...

A Big Summer Story You Missed: Soaring Oil Debt by Andrew Nikiforuk, originally published by The Tyee  | TODAY Over 100 of the world's largest energy companies are running out of cash. Photo of Keystone pipeline in Nebraska by Shannon Ramos. Creative Commons licensed.Some of the summer's biggest news stories took place in the bombed schools of Gaza, the abandoned hospitals of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the wheat fields of eastern Ukraine and the bloody mountains of northern Iraq.But one of the most important made virtually no headlines at all, and seemed to only appear on the website of...

Since about 2009 and until just recently, Saudi Arabia shipped discounted crude to the U.S. in growing volumes even as total U.S. waterborne imports fell. But while Saudi Arabia isn’t about to exit the U.S. market, cheaper domestic crude oils are beginning to displace Saudi imports. Daily U.S. crude imports fell from 11.8 million barrels in 2010 to 9.8 million barrels in 2013. Over roughly the same period, U.S. daily oil imports from Saudi Arabia rose from an annual average of just under 1.1 million barrels to about 1.5 million barrels, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration....

3 Reasons Why Pioneer Natural Resources Stock Could Rise By Matt DiLallo | More Articles | Save For Later August 25, 2014 | Comments (0) Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE: PXD  ) stock has gone up nearly 600% in just the past five years. That has crushed the market, which is up just over 92% over that same time period. Despite the market-crushing returns, there's still a lot of fuel left in Pioneer Natural Resources' tank. Here are three reasons why the stock could continue to rise.It's sitting on nearly 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil and gas Pioneer Natural Resources believes...

From his driveway, Tom Wheeler's view of North Dakota's sprawling grasslands seems endless. Fields of soy, wheat and canola stretch to the horizon in all directions. But as drillers flock to the state to cash in on North Dakota's booming shale play, that horizon has become increasingly marked by natural gas flares. Flaring is the burning of natural gas that can't be processed or sold. All those flares, meanwhile, are adding up. They burn so brightly that NASA astronauts have taken pictures of their glow from space. For some landowners like Wheeler, it's not the noise or light pollution that...

America has a deficit of workers. Willing workers. Capable workers. Skilled, or at least semi-skilled workers, who can do a job and do it well. There are at least one million jobs that go begging day after day if only employers could find workers to fill them. This probably seems hard-to-believe. After all, how can America have a worker shortage when we have about 18 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed? When the real unemployment rate is 12 percent? Well certainly the economy isn’t creating nearly as many jobs as it should – in large part because of regulatory...

Ending ban on oil exports would mean cheaper gasoline, energy executive says Posted on August 22, 2014 at 7:51 pm by Vicki Vaughan in Crude oil, Eagle Ford, Gasoline, LNG, Markets EmailPrint2 inShare (Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty) Should the government end its 40-year-old ban on exporting crude oil, the nation would enjoy benefits ranging from jobs to a decline in gasoline prices, an oil industry economist said in a talk this week in San Antonio.ConocoPhillips senior economist Helen Currie, citing a study by the energy consulting firm IHS Inc., said prices at the pump would fall by about 8 cents a gallon...

Must-know: Tighter-than-expected oil supply in the future By Russ Koesterich, CFA - Disclosure • BlackRock  • Aug 21, 2014 10:08 am EDT First, here’s a quick look at my expectations for oil supply and demand. Currently, oil prices remain elevated because global demand has continued to climb, despite slower growth in China (FXI), and supply overall has been unexpectedly constrained by both geology and geopolitical unrest. Looking forward, oil supply is likely to remain constrained and oil demand is likely to continue to grow.Oil supply: There’s a good chance that future oil supply may be tighter than expected. Currently, oil prices...

Refracking brings 'vintage' oil and gas wells to life Aug 20, 2014, 10.43AM IST (The development highlights…) HOUSTON/WILLISTON, NORTH DAKOTA: A fracking boom isn't enough for U.S. oil and gas producers - they're now starting the re-fracking boom.Wells sunk as little as three years ago are being fracked again, the latest innovation in the technology-driven shale oil revolution. Hydraulic fracturing, which has upended global energy markets by lifting U.S. crude oil output to a 25-year high, has been troubled by quick declines in oil and gas output. The development highlights how producers must constantly invest and tinker, both to...

Turn natural gas into gasoline for $1 per gallon The clear liquid flowing from a collection of pipes and wires in a Hayward industrial park smells just like gasoline, and for all practical purposes, it is.But it wasn’t made from crude oil. Instead, it came from natural gas, the fuel whose sudden abundance in America is reshaping the country’s energy landscape.Siluria Technologies says it can produce large quantities of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and chemicals at a lower cost than traditional refineries and chemical plants. At today’s natural gas prices, Siluria’s technology could make gasoline at roughly $1 per gallon, according to...

Pickens: Brent crude will be above $100 forever Jackie DeAngelis | @JackieDeAngelis 4 Hours AgoCNBC.com 72 SHARES                         39COMMENTSJoin the Discussion Oil and gas entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens thinks international oil prices will stay high indefinitely—over $100 a barrel—despite recent declines in the futures market. Adam Jeffery | CNBC T. Boone Pickens At the Investools 4th Annual Investor Education Conference in Dallas, Pickens reminded investors that OPEC's largest producer, Saudi Arabia, needs oil prices to remain elevated in order to maintain its social spending programs; therefore, the Organization...

Oil Production In Permian Causes Pipeline Bottleneck In TexasCatherine Ngai|Tuesday, August 12, 2014 NEW YORK, Aug 12 (Reuters) - Oil production from the burgeoning Permian Basin of West Texas is outpacing pipelines' ability to transport oil to the Gulf Coast, causing coastal refiners to pay an additional premium to acquire oil.On Monday, that bottleneck caused oil for delivery at Midland, Texas <WTC-WTM> to trade at nearly $20 a barrel less than Gulf Coast benchmark Light Louisiana Sweet <WTC-LLS>, the deepest discount in 17 months. It was little changed on Tuesday.The deep discount is a consequence of the U.S. shale revolution, which...

Why This Oil Baron Thinks U.S. Oil Production Could Double By Adam Galas | More Articles August 17, 2014 | Comments (0) America's oil production is on a roll. After peaking in November of 1970 at 10 million barrels per day (bpd) and declining for nearly 40 years to a low of just 5 million bpd in 2008, today's oil production has soared 67%. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) is expecting another 13.6% increase by 2016 to 9.5 million bpd, before production tapers off in 2020. This miracle has been made possible by soaring shale oil production out of Texas...

One of the weirder facts of contemporary life is that “environmentalists” generally prefer wind power to fracking. Unless you suffer from an anti-carbon fetish, there is no comparison, as the Telegraph reports: A wind farm requires 700 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as a fracking site, according to analysis by the energy department’s recently-departed chief scientific advisor. … Prof MacKay said that a shale gas site uses less land and “creates the least visual intrusion”, compared with a wind farm or solar farm capable of producing the equivalent amount of energy over 25 years. This...

TRENTON — For the second time in two years, Gov. Chris Christie has vetoed a bill that would have banned the dumping of fracking waste in New Jersey. Environmentalists and lawmakers from both parties had championed the measure, which would have prohibited companies from treating, discharging, disposing, and storing waste from hydraulic fracturing — the controversial practice of pumping water, sand, and chemicals deep underground to harvest natural gas. Though an increase in fracking in recent years has caused U.S. energy production to spike, critics worry that the practice could pollute drinking water supplies. And while fracking doesn't happen in...

Pioneer CEO: US oil production could hit 14 million barrels/day Posted on August 6, 2014 at 6:54 pm by Jennifer A. Dlouhy in General Scott Sheffield, chairman and CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, speaks in Midland, Texas. (Tim Fischer\Reporter-Telegram) DENVER — Technological improvements will allow energy companies to scrape more crude out of the ground and drive U.S. oil production higher, even as producers seek new overseas markets for the fossil fuels, executives said Wednesday.Although government forecasters expect U.S. oil production to peak around 9.5 million barrels per day in 2016, Scott Sheffield, CEO of Irving, Texas-based Pioneer Natural Resources...

On the one hand, many environmental and conservation groups are bitterly opposed to shale development. Ranged against them are those within and beyond the energy industry who believe that the exploitation of shale gas can prove not only vital but hugely positive for the British economy. Rather oddly, hardly anyone seems to have asked the one question which is surely fundamental: does shale development make economic sense? My conclusion is that it does not. That Britain needs new energy sources is surely beyond dispute. Between 2003 and 2013, domestic production of oil and gas slumped by 62pc and 65pc respectively,...

We Could Unlock More Than 267 Billion Barrels of Oil in America By Tyler Crowe | More Articles | Save For Later July 30, 2014 | Comments (0) Photo credit: WPX Energy If I had told you five or six years ago that America would be producing more oil than ever before and potentially becoming an exporter of crude within a decade, you probably would have had me institutionalized. Yet thanks to the advancements in drilling techniques, we have been able to access one of the most abundant resources we didn't think were possible: shale and tight oil. Today, oil...

Fracking in the state of Colorado during the year 2012 created 111,000 jobs whereas Barack Obama’s entire economy has only generated 110,000 jobs for Millennials since 2007. What is wrong with our president? Does he suffer from a migraine headache or is he simply refusing to think straight? His administration is spending up to $1,000 a day caring for illegal immigrant children carrying measles, mumps, scabies, lice, chicken pox, strep throat and tuberculosis. Meanwhile, legal American citizens with law degrees are living with their parents and struggling to find jobs that even pay minimum wage. Describing the influx of undocumented...

Charts and maps of America’s Amazing Shale Oil Revolution; and the new ‘Big Three’: Bakken, Eagle Ford and Permian Mark J. Perry | July 15th, 2014   Skip to Responses     Below are four charts and two maps that help tell the story of America’s Amazing Shale Oil Revolution:1. The Big Three. Yesterday, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) updated its monthly “Drilling Productivity Report” with new estimates of oil production through August in America’s three, super-giant oil fields, the “Big Three”: the Bakken in North Dakota and Eagle Ford Shale and Permian Basin in Texas. As...