Free Republic

In what must seem like a nightmare scenario for Iran, not only is another U.S. president leveling sanctions against its economy, and particularly that economy’s lifeblood, its oil sector, but the current U.S. president has admittedly made it his mission to drive Tehran to its knees over what he sees as non-compliance over the 2015 nuclear accord between western powers and Tehran. As recently as the start of this month, the oil markets narrative was that perhaps President Donald Trump had pushed a bit too hard by reimposing sanctions against Iran. Oil markets, for their part, were jittery while both...

As global oil markets shift their attention from U.S. shale oil production back to a resurgent Saudi Arabia and Russia and geopolitical concerns bearing down on oil prices, Citigroup said last Wednesday that the U.S. is poised to surpass Saudi Arabia next year as the world’s largest exporter of crude and oil products. The U.S. exported a record 8.3 million barrels per day (bpd) last week of crude oil and petroleum products, the government also said Wednesday. Top crude oil exporter Saudi Arabia’s, for its part, exported 9.3 million bpd in January, while Russia exported 7.4 million bpd, the bank...

The proclamation of solar power’s dominance may have been a bit prematureMeanwhile, in the Oil-ympics, Team USA is currently looking strong: US sells oil to the Middle East as surging domestic production puts America on pace to rival Russia and Saudi as world's top energy producer. In 2013, the US shipped just over 100,000 barrels a day.This past November, American firms exported 1.53 million barrels a day.The US now exports up to 1.7 million barrels per day of crude, and this year will have the capacity to export 3.8 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas.Terminals conceived for importing...

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...

Mr. Drangmeister of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association is invited to debate us (Panhandle Import Reduction Initiative) on OPEC , free trade and the price war against in the American Southwest. Apparently, he missed our presentation at the Independent Producers Association of New Mexico (IPANM) Convention recently in Santa Fe. This OP-ED is a response to his comments in a news article in this newspaper by Maddy Hayden It is not too late for him to learn that as a communications officer in an oil and gas trade association he should support an open forum of all ideas...

The Jacki Daily Show starts at 2pm ET / 1CT on Glenn Beck's TheBlazeRadioNetwork Today! Congressman Pete Sessions, member of House GOP Leadership, gives us our energy update from Washington DC, including the outlook on natural gas exports. Then, Rob Henneke of TPPF talks about Texas Governor Abbott's new effort to unite the states to hold a Constitutional Convention, with nine proposed Constitutional amendments to return power back to the states. Then, energy economist Bud Weinstein of the Maguire Energy Institute talks about the geopolitics of oil exports. Listen at theblaze.com/radio or on demand on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Stitcher.com where...

Score one for the new Speaker The new budget deal heading for President Obama’s desk has a lot that’s awful in it, including extensions of lots of taxes and subsidies that are supposedly temporary but are never allowed to lapse. There’s no defending any of this as policy, and many will say this proves Paul Ryan is just another RINO squish like John Boehner. I’m a glass-half-full guy. All that would have been the default stance of any other Congress, and certainly of Obama. Ryan, to his credit, at least exacted a price for keeping these things alive the next...

House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) traded exporting oil for importing Syrians in the trillion dollar omnibus bill. Ryan appeared on the Michael Medved show to tout what he called his major victory, lifting the ban on oil exports.

Just because you’ve been doing something for decades, that doesn’t mean that you need to keep doing it. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is the roughly forty year old ban we have on crude oil exports, enacted back when the Middle East oil barons decided to kick off an embargo, leading to skyrocketing gas prices and long lines at service stations. Congress seems to slowly be getting the message on this subject, and yesterday the House finally passed a bill to end the ban. (Yahoo News) A bill to repeal the U.S. oil export ban passed...

Defying a White House veto threat, the Republican-controlled House on Friday approved a bill to lift a 40-year-old U.S. ban on crude oil exports. The House approved the bill on a 261-159 vote. Supporters said an ongoing boom in oil and gas drilling has made the 1970s-era restrictions obsolete. Lifting the export ban would lower prices at the pump, create jobs and boost the economy, said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. […] The White House called the bill unnecessary and argued that a decision on whether to end the ban should be made by the Commerce secretary. …

Did the Obama administration just quietly lift the four-decade old ban on U.S. crude oil exports? Not quite. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters reported that the Commerce Department issued a private letter ruling allowing Pioneer Natural Resources and Enterprise Products Partners to export unrefined crude oil that comes from the Eagle Ford geological region of Texas.

An Iraqi Kurdish official says the country’s self-ruled northern Kurdish region has suspended oil exports over a payment row with the central government in Baghdad. … In April, the Kurds stopped the exports of around 100,000 barrels a day due to delays in payments. …

Most Iranian military threats are more propaganda than reality. Take, for example, their threat to shut the Straits of Hormuz (where ships exit the Persian Gulf and enter the Indian Ocean). Some 40 percent of the worlds oil shipments pass through the Straits of Hormuz, which comes to about 15-20 tankers a day (plus a dozen or more non-tankers). The Persian Gulf in general, is a busy waterway. It is 989 kilometers long, and the average depth is 50 meters (maximum depth is 90 meters). The Iranian problem is that they have a small navy, an obsolete air force and...

Foreign Investment and Iran’s Future by: Bethany Stotts, December 11, 2007 ....Since the NIE report was designed to assess “Iran’s current and projected ability to develop nuclear weapons,” among other variables, it is also useful to consider the influence that international investment practices will have on Iran’s foreign-policy decisions and future capabilities. “In Iran, there are some projections that by 2015 Iran will have so little oil that it will stop exporting, not because they’re running out of oil underground, but because their policies are not allowing for foreign investment,” said Dr. Ariel Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage...

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez said on Friday he will cut oil sales to the United States if the American government interferes in Sunday's referendum aimed at allowing him to run for reelection indefinitely. Chavez told supports at a rally that the state oil company will halt sales to the United States on Monday if Washington interferes with the vote on the proposed constitutional reform. The Venezuelan leader and Cuba ally also said he had ordered the military to protect oil fields and refineries in case of political violence. The reform would also give him direct control...

Recovering Iraqi oil production could go some way towards meeting an expected spike in world oil demand later this year, assuming that security improves and output can be ramped up, a senior Iraqi oil marketing official said on Thursday. But any boost in Iraq's crude production is still likely to fall short of optimistic output estimates of 3.5m barrels a day made in the early days of the US-led administration in Iraq. "We expect to boost our production by 500,000 to 750,000 b/d [barrels per day], if and only if the security situation improves and if investment plans are...

Ray is completing his tour in Iraq. He offers this summary of what's been accomplished there: Over 400,000 kids have up-to-date immunizations. School attendance is up 80% from levels before the war. Over 1,500 schools have been renovated and rid of the weapons stored there so education can occur. The port of Uhm Qasar was renovated so grain can be off-loaded from ships faster. The country had its first 2 billion barrel export of oil in August. Over 4.5 million people have clean drinking water for the first time ever in Iraq. The country now receives 2 times the electrical...

This week’s map shows oil refineries in China. Refineries are sized by their refining capacity and symbolized by their owner. This map was created using POWERmap®.