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Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said in a phone interview with Alaska Dispatch News on Tuesday that she plans to speak out against oil company-funded efforts to maintain the oil tax structure put in place in January. “I don’t want Alaskans to be deceived,” she said.

The Obama administration will unveil new rules Wednesday proposing more stringent safety standards on trains carrying crude oil and other flammable fuels. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is expected to announced the new rules, which will include standards for tank cars, speed limits for trains carrying crude oil, brake standards and testing for oil and other flammable liquids, according to a Wall Street Journal report. A Department of Transportation spokesperson confirmed to The Hill that the announcement will be made Wednesday. The federal rules have been anxiously awaited by the railroad and oil industries, which have met with White House and...

A new study shows the lesser prairie chicken population has exploded by 20 percent prompting concern by western lawmakers that the Obama administration acted hastily when it listed the bird as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The aerial survey conducted last month by the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies showed the grouse species numbers jumped from 18,747 to 22,415. That study plus the Agriculture Department’s tardiness in reporting conservation efforts to Congress as required by law prompted a letter from lawmakers including Colorado Republican Rep. Scott Tipton demanding the report. “We request that your department provide this...

An ordinary, long-scheduled journey of an oil drilling rig into Arctic waters is turning into a major political exercise, attracting international scrutiny and creating a dilemma for ExxonMobil. Exxon, the top U.S. oil major and the world's most valued oil company, is bringing the rig, called West Alpha, from Norway to the Russian Arctic. It is hoping for a major discovery in the Kara Sea with Russian partner Rosneft. The journey has begun just as the United States has slapped the toughest sanctions yet on Russia, including on Rosneft, over escalating violence in Ukraine. Further sanctions are likely after the...

Since the mid-1970s, the United States has run a deficit in merchandise trade, meaning that payments for imports exceeded receipts for exports. This large and growing deficit on the merchandise trade balance reached a maximum of $883 billion in the second quarter of 2008. As a result of the recession, dramatic declines of imports in excess of exports during the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 reduced the merchandise trade deficit by 49%, to $449 billion in the second quarter of 2009. This trend of declining imports resulted in the lowest quarterly deficit level since early...

The Stunning Key That Could Unlock 160 Billion Barrels of Oil Trapped Underneath America By Matt DiLallo | More Articles July 20, 2014 | Comments (0)  Photo credit: Flickr/Melissa  It is estimated that there are 160 billion barrels of oil still trapped underneath this country in what are considered depleted oil fields. That's a tremendous amount of oil given that America uses about seven billion barrels of it each year. In fact, if we could only find the key to unlock this trapped oil we could extend fleeting our reserves by more than 22 years.That's why it probably comes as a surprise...

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...

Opening the Eastern Seaboard to offshore oil exploration for the first time in decades, the Obama administration on Friday approved the use of sonic cannons to discover deposits under the ocean floor by shooting sound waves 100 times louder than a jet engine through waters shared by endangered whales and turtles. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's approval of this technology is the first step toward identifying new oil and gas deposits in federal waters from Florida to Delaware

The Obama administration on Friday gave the oil industry the green light to use air guns and sonic sensors to search for possible oil and gas under Atlantic waters, overriding environmentalists concerned that the seismic research can harm whales and other marine life. Although geophysical research companies will still have to apply for individual permits to conduct seismic studies along the south- and mid-Atlantic coast — and undergo more rigorous environmental scrutiny of their specific plans — the Interior Department’s formal decision opens the door for the activity. Friday’s move also helps pave the way for possible drilling off the...

Bureau of Land Management Director Neil Kornze said that increased drilling and a shortage of staff are behind his agency’s request for a fee system to increase the agency’s inspection capacity. ... BLM is focused on a range of inspections, including drilling and production inspections. ... Irregular and declining budgets have hindered our ability to move out aggressively in this area. Through the President’s 2015 budget proposal, we are now seeking to fund inspections through a fee system that will allow us to be much more responsive to the needs of industry and, importantly, to meet the foundational safety and...

In 2003, before the US invasion of Iraq, Luke Harding found the Kurds full of defiance and hope. Returning 11 years later – with Baghdad's hold on power crumbling – he finds a self-confident region transformed by oil money The news from Iraq has been grim of late. Sectarian killings, political feuding and the flamboyant rise of Islamist fanaticism. :snip: One part of Iraq, however, has largely escaped the mayhem engulfing the rest of the country. It is Kurdistan, the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Its capital, Irbil, is a haven of religious tolerance and relative safety. The suburb...

Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region has begun to pump oil from Kirkuk fields previously controlled by Iraq’s central government into the pipeline system that runs in its own territory, a senior Iraqi oil official said on July 17. Kirkuk lies on the disputed boundary between the northern Kurdish region and the rest of Iraq and is at the heart of a long-running dispute between Baghdad and Arbil, the Kurdish regional capital, over territory and natural resources. Kurdish forces took control of production facilities at the Kirkuk and Bai Hassan northern fields on July 11, exploiting a power vacuum created by an...

Petroleum engineers are among the best paid professionals in the United States. Only chief executives and some specialist doctors earned more last year, according to federal government pay data. Petroleum engineers were paid an average of $132,000 a year, with the top 10 percent on more than $187,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). These figures include everyone from the newest graduates to the most experienced engineers with decades of experience, and are based on median earnings in May 2013. Petroleum engineers earned almost four times as much as the average employee across the economy, who was on...

Much larger than Eagle Ford and once thought to have reached peak production, new technology has brought us full circle back to the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, where the recent shift to horizontal well drilling has rendered this play the unconventional ground zero.

Denton late Tuesday night became the latest jurisdiction to announce a referendum on a drilling technique, joining Colorado and New York in allowing voters to decide where hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas may take place. This a deeply worrying trend that mixes misinformation with a not-in-my-backyard attitude that too often ignores science, engineering and the nation's need for energy. In many ways, though, the drilling companies and state regulators have themselves to blame for public outrage by failing to quickly and transparently address the concerns of local residents. First, let me say I've spoken to a lot of people...

Listen to the Michigan Education Association and you would think that anyone who dares talk to teachers about their rights is trying to destroy education in America. To some extent, the rhetoric is expected. Changes to the status quo in education mean that unions lose their stranglehold on the tax dollars they’ve become accustomed to getting with little accountability. The MEA does not like that the Mackinac Center for Public Policy is informing teachers of their rights under Michigan's right-to-work law. Teachers who belong to the MEA but do not want to support the union for any variety of reasons...

On Tuesday, the state-backed China Oilfield Services Limited said the billion-dollar platform, which had been drilling in the heart of highly contested waters claimed by Vietnam, had “precisely extracted the related geological data as planned” and was being redeployed to sea blocks off China’s Hainan Island. (Please see full article at link)

Energy companies currently leave about 95 percent of the crude in the ground at today’s unconventional oil wells, but they face major technological challenges in boosting recovery rates, a Schlumberger scientist said Tuesday. Robert Kleinberg, a fellow with the oilfield services firm, bemoaned the current 5 percent recovery factor at tight oil wells, where crude is pulled from the pores of extremely dense rock formations. Geologists and engineers are actively looking for ways to boost the figure, but traditional methods applied at more conventional oil wells — such as pumping steam underground and flooding the formations with water — don’t...

Much larger than Eagle Ford and once thought to have reached peak production, new technology has brought us full circle back to the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, where the recent shift to horizontal well drilling has rendered this play the unconventional ground zero. Determining where the next real oil boom will be depends largely on following the technology, and while the Permian Basin has been slower than others to switch from vertical well drilling to horizontal drilling, horizontal has now outpaced vertical, and investors are lining up to get in on the game. Until about 12 years...

With the release of the latest oil production data for the Bakken in North Dakota, this tight oil play reached a new record of 975,000 barrels per day in May.  This represents an increase of almost 37,000 barrels per day from the previous month, and is the largest April-May increase on record.  Daily oil per well remains stable at 127 barrels, down only slightly from the May 2013 value of 130. Overall production for North Dakota was also up in May to a new record of 1.04 million barrels per day, with daily oil per well steady at 99 barrels....