Free Republic

President Donald Trump as a candidate promised to unshackle the American energy industry by undoing most of the job killing regulations created by the Obama administration. In a court filing, Justice Department lawyers revealed that the new administration is planning to repeal the Obama hydraulic fracturing rule, that placed severe restrictions on the process of getting oil and natural gas from shale. Earlier yesterday, the administration said they would roll back some of the automobile emissions standards and curtail other Obama administration environmental rules on water and coal leasing.

Some 1.2 billion barrels of oil have been discovered in Alaska, marking the biggest onshore discovery in the U.S. in three decades. The massive find of conventional oil on state land could bring relief to budget pains in Alaska brought on by slumping production in the state and the crash in oil prices. The new discovery was made in just the past few days in Alaska’s North Slope, which was previously viewed as an aging oil basin. Spanish oil giant Repsol and its privately-held U.S. partner Armstrong Energy announced the find on Thursday, predicting production could begin as soon as...

The House of Delegates has approved a bill to permanently ban natural gas fracking in Western Maryland. The bill passed by a vote of 97-40. The 97 votes is 12 more than the minimum of 85 needed to override a veto from Governor Larry Hogan. That majority was important to the chairman of the committee hearing the bill in the Senate. The chairman of the Senate Education Health and Environmental Affairs Committee, Joan Carter Conway of Baltimore City, says she won’t bring the bill to the Senate floor unless lawmakers have enough votes to override a possible veto from Governor...

Shell has struck a deal to sell all its oil sands production assets in Canada, except for a 10-percent stake in the Athabasca Oil Sands Project, as part of its $30-billion divestment program aimed at reducing its debt load that it accumulated with the acquisition of BG Group. The total net value of the deal is $7.25 billion, and the buyer is Canadian Natural Resources, which will partner with Shell on another deal: the acquisition of Marathon Oil Canada Corporation, which has a 20-percent stake in the AOSP. The stake will be split equally between the partners, each contributing $1.25...

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

In a rather unconventional warning, Continental Resources chief executive Harold Hamm said on Wednesday that should the U.S. oil industry embark on another spending spree, it could “kill” the market. Speaking at the CERAWeek conference in Houston – one of the largest gatherings of oil executives and ministers, including this year Saudi Arabia’s oil minister Khalid Al-Falih – Hamm said that U.S. crude oil output “could go pretty high”. But Hamm was quick to add, as quoted by Bloomberg: “But it’s going to have to be done in a measured way, or else we kill the market.”

The dynamics of the oil industry have changed dramatically since the beginning of 2010. Because of the U.S. shale revolution, the U.S. is now a country with oil production rivaling that of Saudi Arabia and Russia. The fundamental shift in oil power has come as a direct result of investment in the technology of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing of tight oil formations in the U.S. In 2010, U.S. production from tight oil shale formations were marginal in comparison to total U.S. oil production; however, tight oil now makes up 52 percent of all U.S. oil production.

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...

President Trump’s pledge that new pipeline projects will use “American steel” will not apply to the Keystone XL project, according to media reports, directly contradicting the president’s own words last week. Politico reported late Thursday night that a White House spokeswoman explained that the project, which has been in the works for the past decade, does not count as a “new” or “retrofitted” pipeline, and therefore is not subject to Mr. Trump’s made-in-America requirement. Comments from TransCanada, the company proposing the project, on Friday morning seem to confirm the firm will not be forced to use all U.S. steel.

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...

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday reversed an Obama-era plan to collect massive amounts of data from oil-and-gas companies — information that ultimately would’ve been used as the basis for new federal regulations on methane. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said the requests made by the prior administration constituted unnecessary burdens on the energy industry. His action also seems to signal that the EPA will not pursue any new methane regulations anytime in the foreseeable future.

A policy of nationalizing chunks of an economy inevitably creates oligarchs who skim profits off the country’s natural resources. As such, you won’t be surprised to learn that the largest energy companies in the world are owned and operated by governments, and they include: Saudi Aramco, Russian Gazprom, China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), National Iranian Oil Co., Petroleos de Venezuela, Brazil’s Petrobras and Malaysia’s Petronas. How they’re run varies wildly—as does where their wealth goes. While we’ve all been inundated with the massive amount of press on the scandals engulfing Brazil’s Petrobras, there are a few that stand out for...

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...

Two years ago, OPEC took steps to increase its market share. It continued with this same policy for two years by pumping oil in an oversupplied market. The result: oil prices tanked and OPEC increased their market share by a small margin. Today, low oil prices are crippling the finances of OPEC members, forcing them to agree to cut production to support oil prices. But just over a month of production cuts and data shows that OPEC has lost around 5 percent market share in Asia since October. The U.S., Brazil, Britain and Libya have increased their supply to Asia...

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...

After months of protest-driven delays, the Dakota Access pipeline is now running ahead of schedule and expected to be ready to deliver oil as early as next month. Attorneys for Energy Transfer Partners said in a court-ordered status report Thursday that the final 1,100-foot section is nearly finished, which would enable the 1,172-mile, four-state pipeline to begin operations months ahead of previous estimates. “Dakota Access reports that the pilot hole is complete,” said the report filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court. “The company is currently reaming the hole — i.e., making it larger in order to accept the pipe. As...

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...

Two years ago, when Saudi Arabia launched an unprecedented campaign to crush high-cost oil producers, in the process effectively putting an end to the OPEC cartel (at least until last year's attempt to cut production), it made a bold bet that U.S. shale producers would be swept under when the price of oil tumbled, leading to a tsunami of bankruptcies, as well as investment and production halts. To an extent it succeeded, but where it may have made a glaring error is the core assumption about shale breakeven costs, which as we reported throughout 2016, were substantially lower than consensus...

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...

President Barack Obama and his green energy confederates are determined to scare the public about a declining supply of "fossil fuels." If we accept the idea that oil is produced by the conversion of organic matter -- from plants to dinosaurs -- under extreme pressure, we must also accept the idea that there is a limited supply of oil and that we've got to do everything we can to find a replacement for fossil fuels before we run out. The evidence is mounting that not only do we have more than a century's worth of recoverable oil in the United...