Free Republic

If the GOP-controlled Legislature goes along with Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf's renewed call for a severance tax, it would be a surefire way to debilitate Pennsylvania's shale-gas industry. Always a bad idea, a severance tax is an even worse idea this time around — because 2016 saw the industry “shed a third of its jobs” and gas prices are still rebounding “from record lows,” according to the Commonwealth Foundation. The state's own Independent Fiscal Office estimates that Pennsylvania's existing impact fee is the equivalent of a 6.9-percent severance tax — higher than severance taxes in Louisiana, Wyoming and West Virginia.

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...

What if the Legislature and governor hike gas and vehicle registration taxes to fix the roads, but then hardly any extra money goes to fix the roads? Drivers started paying those higher taxes this month, though they were enacted near the end of 2015. But at least in the short term, the main effect of these tax increases appears to be higher spending on schools and Medicaid, not road repairs. The 7.3-cent-per-gallon tax increase motorists began paying on Jan. 1 and the 20 percent increase in the vehicle registration tax are expected to cost road users an additional $460 million...

Gas attack sparks mass evacuation at school in Germany A MASS evacuation is underway after a gas attack at a German school left dozens of students struggling to breathe.Emergency services and specialist environmental experts raced to the scene after what is believed to be pepper spray was pumped into the gymnasium at the Reinbeker Weg School in Hamburg. More than 30 students reported having trouble breathing as the debilitating gas also left them unable to see properly. The fire brigade arrived with several rescue vehicles and emergency doctors, some wearing bio-hazard suits, and rushed students away from the scene....

Drivers in Michigan will pay 7.3 cents more per gallon in gasoline taxes starting Sunday, thanks to a package of transportation-related tax hikes signed into law in 2015 by Gov. Rick Snyder. Truckers will pay an additional 11.3 cents per gallon for diesel fuel tax. The measures are expected to provide $1.2 billion more for transportation each year when fully phased in in 2021, according to the House Fiscal Agency, with most of the increase slated for road repairs. Of the $1.2 billion, $634 million will be new taxes. The money comes from substantial increases in diesel fuel, regular gas...

Barack Obama’s plan for military intervention in Syria was abruptly derailed by David Cameron and British members of parliament, US secretary of state John Kerry claimed on Thursday. The American president said he would bomb the Syrian regime if it used chemical weapons but he did not follow through on his promise. The failure to enforce his stated “red line” after President Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas in a Damascus suburb in August 2013 is seen by some as the worst stain on Obama’s legacy.

Barack Obama’s plan for military intervention in Syria was abruptly derailed by David Cameron and British members of parliament, US secretary of state John Kerry claimed on Thursday. The American president said he would bomb the Syrian regime if it used chemical weapons but he did not follow through on his promise. The failure to enforce his stated “red line” after President Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas in a Damascus suburb in August 2013 is seen by some as the worst stain on Obama’s legacy. The British parliament’s vote against air strikes has long been cited by Obama and others...

County officials in western Colorado have regularly lambasted Planning 2.0 and this week, Garfield County joined in with five other counties in the western United States considering suing to halt the rule, which they have criticized as a central-planning measure. The BLM this month announced that the rule was final and on Monday, Garfield County agreed to spend as much as $40,000 with the Texas-based property-rights organization, the American Stewards of Liberty, to halt it. While Garfield County is taking an active role, Mesa County officials are looking to Congress and a Republican administration under President-elect Donald Trump to deal...

This week almost 50 million Americans will take planes, trains, automobiles (and even boats) to travel miles from home for Thanksgiving festivities according to AAA. The auto club sees more than a million extra travelers leaving home this year between now and the end of the month. Thanksgiving is traditionally of as a time for turkey and dinner with family, but given these statistics perhaps it ought to be thought of as a time for travel. After all, the first Thanksgiving was really about travel as well with Europeans having just finished the perilous journey across thousands of miles of...

A Houston company is looking to pump $500 million into South Texas to create the largest new refinery in the U.S. in nearly 40 years. The facility — located in the southwest corner of Duval County off of Texas Highway 359 — will be able to process up to 50,000 barrels of Eagle Ford shale light crude oil a day, and will have up to 4 million barrels of available storage, the company said in a news release. Raven Petroleum says it will produce diesel, jet fuel, naphtha, gasoline, and liquified petroleum gas products to be exported via rail and...

When a massive country de-nationalizes its entire energy sector and opens its oil and gas doors for the first time ever to foreign companies, the opportunities are staggering. Welcome to the ‘new’ Mexico, and welcome to the early stages of an oil and gas game that will be bigger—from an investor’s perspective—than anything in history. Mexico’s move to implement historic energy reform legislation in December 2013, and follow-up legislation in 2014 that further solidified the comprehensive de-nationalization, provides an unprecedented opportunity for oil companies looking to tap into Mexico’s huge energy potential.

Dear President-Elect Trump, There’s work to be done. And I know you’re up for a challenge. In fact, I’m now sure of it. So let me lay out a policy position that I am truly hoping you will adopt as your own. I’m talking about natural gas as a transportation fuel: cheap, clean, abundant natural gas. And I’m talking about U.S. energy independence, balanced budgets, jobs, trade and the environment. We use natural gas for power generation and as a heating fuel but that’s an old story for a new reality. Fracking has unlocked a phenomenal amount of gas in...

Moscow — Leaders of Turkey and Russia signed a long-delayed deal Monday to build the TurkStream gas pipeline under the Black Sea to deliver Russian gas to Europe's doorstep within three years. The rapid warming trend in Russo-Turkish relations holds deep implications for Syria's immediate crisis, which dominated the talks and the subsequent headlines, but the fallout from that pipeline deal is a potentially crushing blow to struggling pro-Western Ukraine and may be rearranging strategic realities around the region for many years to come. Analysts say that if TurkStream goes ahead it will enable Moscow to cut its former main...

Problematic, in a very big way even if the offer was made.Qatar’s ties to Al Qaeda and ISIS aren’t news. They’ve effectively served as intermediaries in everything from ransom exchanges for hostages to Taliban negotiations. But actually trying to secure terrorist swaps for prisoners on their own behalf would have been a new frontier. Before he was released from a U.S. maximum-security prison last week, a confessed al Qaeda sleeper agent was offered up in a potential prisoner swap that would have freed two Americans held abroad.According to two individuals with direct knowledge of the case, the proposition was...

On September 22, Donald Trump reaffirmed his intent to revive the American coal industry--without many details on how to do it. What influences the price and demand for coal? Can Donald Trump influence the forces behind these market drivers? We nominate these four factors as the most important drivers of coal prices: production and demand for steel, because the coal industry sells and exports metallurgical coal used in steel production; demand for electricity, insofar as much electricity is still generated from coal; Chinese government interference in the steel and metallurgical coal markets, because China is the world's largest steel producer...

Grand Junction will no longer be home to a district Bureau of Land Management office after the agency’s Grand Junction Field Office gets transferred from the northwest Colorado district to the southwest district under a reorganization. ... Mesa County Commissioner John Justman is uncomfortable with the Grand Junction Field Office no longer being part of the Northwest District, despite Mesa County’s close economic ties to the oil and gas development that takes place in northwest Colorado. Many area oil and gas jobs are based in Mesa County. “Financially the county is much more attached to the Northwest District than the...

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral argument next Tuesday, September 27 on the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called Clean Power Plan. The centerpiece of resident Obama’s climate policy agenda, the Plan establishes first-ever carbon dioxide (CO2) emission standards for “existing” (already built) coal and natural gas power plants. The Plan will increase consumer energy prices and impede job and GDP growth yet have no discernible effect on global temperatures or sea levels. However, that’s not why the Court should strike it down. The Court should overturn the Plan because it is an unlawful power grab. The Plan will...

September 20, 2016 Associated Press A main gas line is expected to restart Wednesday with a temporary bypass after a leak and spill in Alabama led to surging fuel prices and some gas shortages across the South, a company official said Tuesday. The roughly 500-foot section of pipe that will serve as the bypass is now complete, and the company expects that will allow it to restart the main gasoline line, Colonial Pipeline spokesman Steve Baker told The Associated Press. "Tomorrow's restart of the main gasoline line is a key milestone," Baker said. "However, it will take a few days...

The Saudis counted them out. So did the Russians, even many domestic analysts said North American shale and tight oil and gas production would decline in the face of low prices and that investment would dry up and output would fall. Well, guess what? They have all been proven wrong. Sure, rig counts have dropped and there have been painful layoffs of workers, but the industry is surviving and against all the “experts” advice, production of natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica shales of the U.S. Northeast is averaging 22.63 billion cubic feet per day in August,

In one of the rare recent increases for a late-summer week, U.S. retail gasoline prices unexpectedly rose in the week to August 22, by US$0.044 to US$ 2.193 per gallon, according to data by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Gasoline prices have dropped during this particular week in eight of the past ten years, and last week saw the biggest increase for this week since a US$0.062 rise in 2005. In the previous two August weeks, U.S. average gasoline prices had stood at US$2.150 in the week to August 8 and at US$2.149 in the week to August 15....