Free Republic

When President Barack Obama first took office in 2009, he was expected to be an adversary of oil and gas companies, seen as polluters of the environment. He hasn't been. Last week, Mr. Obama helped the industry achieve its biggest priority of the past two years: the lifting of the 40-year-old ban on oil exports, which he signed into law as part of broader spending and tax legislation. The White House helped negotiate lifting the ban with Congress in exchange for temporary renewal of tax credits for wind and solar industries--energy industries that provide electricity and for the most part...

A four-day strike at Petrobras gathered steam on Wednesday, cutting crude and natural gas output from the No. 2 South American oil producer and threatening to become the most disruptive walkout at the state-run oil company in 20 years. On Wednesday, Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as Petrobras is formally known, said in a securities filing late Wednesday that oil output in Brazil was about 140,000 barrels a day, or 6.5 percent below pre-strike levels of about 2.1 million barrels a day. Using contingency plans management restored production that was cut by as much as 273,000 barrels a day, or 13 percent...

New Mexico’s oil and gas industry may be in the doldrums now, but state and economic development officials are laying the groundwork for a rapid comeback when markets improve. Gov. Susana Martinez released a new energy plan for New Mexico in September that calls for broad infrastructure development in the state’s Permian Basin in the southeast and the San Juan Basin in the northwest to facilitate oil and gas development. That includes road improvements, new pipelines to transport crude and natural gas, and possibly a new 100-mile rail line running from Interstate 40 in Gallup to Farmington. It also calls...

Get ready for some bad news and red ink. With the bulk of quarterly earnings reports in the energy industry yet to be announced, there are already $6.5 billion worth of asset write-downs, according to Bloomberg. And that could be just the tip of the iceberg. A Barclays’ assessment last week predicted $20 billion in impairment charges from just six companies. Write-downs occur when the expected future cash flow from an asset falls sufficiently that a company has to report that the asset has lost some of its value. With oil prices half of what they were from mid-2014, oil...

Houston-based Occidental Petroleum Corp. is reportedly selling its Bakken shale assets in North Dakota at a steeply discounted price of $500 million to Lime Rock Resources private equity firm in Houston. Reuters broke the story, but Guy Baber of Simmons & Company International wrote Friday that Occidental was shopping the acreage in the fall of 2014 for as much as $3 billion. Occidental was still seeking at least $1 billion this summer, according to Simmons. Both Occidental and Houston-based Lime Rock Resources declined comment, and refused to confirm or deny the reported sale of roughly 300,000 acres. The Simmons note...

Much has been written about the mounting pile of debt for U.S. oil companies (not to mention the well-known Brazilian oil giant). Not that long ago, many oil and gas companies secured at least a part of their revenue by hedging contracts. Bloomberg already reported in June that many of these companies saw their artificial safety nets vanishing as oil prices failed to recover. One month later, we heard such morale boosting terms as ‘frack now, pay later,’ which were merely a bold move by struggling oil services companies to encourage cash strapped oil and gas companies to continue operations....

The hunt for new stores of oil and gas has been dramatically curtailed amid a global crude slump, with exploration budgets at the largest oil companies cut in half from their peak levels in 2013, according to a new analysis. Investment banking firm Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., which tracked exploration capital spending at integrated oil companies and major exploration and production companies, forecast that spending will fall to $25 billion next year, down from the $50 billion these same companies spent three years ago. Oil companies are spending less in part because service costs have tumbled alongside oil prices,...

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta — At a camp for oil workers here, a collection of 16 three-story buildings that once housed 2,000 workers sits empty. A parking lot at a neighboring camp is now dotted with abandoned cars. With oil prices falling precipitously, capital-intensive projects rooted in the heavy crude mined from Alberta’s oil sands are losing money, contributing to the loss of about 35,000 energy industry jobs across the province. Despite a severe economic downturn in a region whose growth once seemed limitless, many energy companies have too much invested in the oil sands to slow down or turn off...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today released the following statement upon the House of Representatives’ passage of legislation lifting restrictions on crude oil exports: “I applaud the House of Representatives for voting today to remove restrictions on exports of domestic crude oil, an effort strongly led by Rep. Joe Barton of Texas. Eliminating the de facto ban on crude oil exports is long past due. This ban is a relic of 1970s price controls, and like most of the 70’s fads, this one is far past its prime. It’s time to put it to bed for good.“Today’s vote...

Oil production from the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale plays look like they’ve peaked and other shale plays may not be far behind. Oil production from seven major U.S. shale plays is expected to fall by a total of 86,000 barrels a day in June, according to a monthly report from the Energy Information Administration released Monday. The previous report released a month ago also showed a forecast for a fall of 57,000 barrels a day in May. Oil output at the Eagle Ford shale play in South Texas is forecast to see the biggest decline, down 47,000 barrels a...

American Eagle Energy became the fourth U.S. energy producer to file for bankruptcy protection in the aftermath of the big drop in crude oil prices. The Colorado-based company that buys and develops oil wells in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota and Montana filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday in Denver’s bankruptcy court. American Eagle Energy, which recently missed an interest payment on its debt, listed assets of $222 million and liabilities of $215 million. Shares of American Eagle Energy traded for as much as $7.05 less than a year ago, reflecting the stunningly fast collapse of...

#1 It is being projected that the U.S. oil rig count will decline by 15 percent in the first quarter of 2015 alone. And when there are less rigs operating, less workers are needed so people get fired. #2 Last week, 55 more oil rigs shut down. That was the largest single week decline in the United States in 24 years. #3 Oilfield services provider Baker Hughes has announced that it plans to lay off 7,000 workers. #4 Schlumberger, a big player in the energy industry, has announced plans to get rid of 9,000 workers. #5 Suncor Energy is eliminating...

Searching old newspapers is one of my favorite pastimes, and I have tried to use them many times to shed light on current events - or to inform readers about how the past is prologue to our very interesting present-day quandaries. Recently, I came across a syndicated column from November 1979 that seemed to point 30 years into the future toward an obscure campaign issue that arose briefly in the 2008 presidential campaign. Though by no means definitive, it provides an interesting insight, at least, into how Chicago politics intersected with the black power movement and Middle Eastern money at...

The Obama administration will release 5 million barrels of sour crude from the United States’ emergency stockpile in what officials described as a “test” of the nation’s ability to respond to oil supply disruptions around the globe.

In spite of the Obama Administration's hostility to carbon-rich energy, private actors with private capital deployed on private (and state) land have launched a game-changing revolution in domestic oil and natural gas production. A scarcely reported milestone conveys the magnitude of this turnaround in the global energy landscape. The U.S. passed Saudi Arabia as the world's largest petroleum producer in November 2012, according to recently released data of the federal Energy Information Administration. Over the last five years, domestic oil output has risen 40% and continually outpaces projections. Last year, domestic output increased by 800,000 barrels per day. This is...

My top 5 oil industry facts: 1) Oil is important. Shockingly, sometimes horrifically important. The world economy has been developing with oil as its lifeblood for over a hundred years. Oil is directly responsible for about 2.5% of world GDP [1], but accounts for 1/3rd of humanity's primary energy supply (>5 terawatts out of 15 terawatts total) [2]. It's over half if you include natural gas. World Energy Consumption by Source, in Terawatts World energy consumption Oil/gas powers 100% of all transportation, within a few significant figures of rounding error. Transportation, in turn, directly accounted for 1/6th of world GDP...

Most probably, on December 1st, Mr. Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN), the presidential candidate of PRI party, will become the new Mexican president for a six year term. The PRI was the dominant political party in Mexico from 1929 to 2000 although with different names. The resurgence of the PRI comes after a 12 year interregnum of the PAN, a center-right party whose merit was to evict the “hegemonic” PRI from Los Pinos, Mexico’s presidential house. The question on everyone’s minds is: Will the return of the PRI spell a reversal of energy policies pursued by PAN during the past 12...

Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a "Reasonable Profits Board" to control gas profits. The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a "windfall profit tax" as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit. The Gas Price Spike Act, H.R. 3784, would apply a windfall tax on the sale of oil and gas that ranges from 50 percent to 100...

With the current brouhaha over the national debt and projected trillion dollar budget deficits, one side wants to cut spending to solve the problem, the other wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and on businesses. The tax raisers talk about cutting spending, and make a token effort to cut a little bit, but mostly they’re just talking. They don’t do spending cuts; they only want to raise taxes. Like many liberal solutions this one sounds good in the abstract. After all, when you want money, where better to get it than from those that have it? The notorious bank...

It might, if the US Fish and Wildlife Service puts the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard on the endangered-species list. USFWS has an open period for public comment at the moment on the proposal, which if adopted could force oil companies in West Texas and New Mexico to close up shop. The industry argues that USFWS is relying on bad data and faulty methodology: A three-inch lizard that thrives in desert conditions could shut down oil and gas operations in portions of Southeast New Mexico and in West Texas, including the state’s top two oil producing counties.Called the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard, it...