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It appears the U.S. government has made a major release of oil reserves to deliberately affect the price of fuel prior to the elections.

U.S. Tight Oil Reserves From Bust to Boom... to Bust Again?   By Keith KohlTuesday, May 13th, 2014Nowhere else in the world are people more used to the boom and bust of the oil industry than in Texas.I think it's safe to say that nearly all of us have heard of the historic gushers in the state's history — and the famous Lucas Gusher at Spindletop is arguably the most famous of them.That single exploratory well in Beaumont started it all for the Lone Star State.And while the image of 100,000 barrels of oil exploding out of the top of one...

By all accounts, Shai Agassi, the founder and CEO of Better Place, Israel's bankrupt electric car company, is an extremely charismatic man. His charm had politicians, venture capitalists, celebrities and non-automotive industry reporters slobbering over him. Everyone wanted to get their picture taken with the man who would transform Israel's auto industry into the first electric powered industry in the world and transform the start-up nation into the transportation hothouse for the world. Agassi's vision was simple and easy to understand. By 2020, half of Israel's cars would be battery powered electric cars supplied by his company, Better Place. We...

Kerry Has Investments in Companies Accused of Violating Iran Sanctions Daniel Halper December 21, 2012 12:59 PM John Kerry, who will be nominated later today to be the next secretary of state, is the richest member of the U.S. Senate. His estimated net worth is, at minimum, $198.65 million, according to disclosure forms. Kerry's disclosure forms also reveal that he has invested in companies accused of doing business with Iran. One of the companies Kerry is invested in is called Petroleo Brasileiro SA Petrobras (Petrobras), it's a Brazilian-based oil and gas corporation. Disclosure forms reveal that Kerry has between $150,000...

(Reuters) - A third day of gasoline "panic buying" among storm-stricken motorists in the New York area and New Jersey prompted authorities to tap emergency oil reserves and ordered the military to dispatch fuel on Friday, while limited deliveries from pipelines and oil barges offered a glimmer of relief. Four days before the U.S. presidential election, the Obama administration made an all-out effort to ease the crisis, authorizing the Defense Logistics Agency to buy and deliver up to 22 million gallons of fuel for the region, waiving a rule barring foreign-flagged vessels transiting U.S. ports and loaning out diesel from...

Legislators and regulators need to observe a fundamental Golden Rule: Do not implement new laws if you have not considered or cannot control important unintended consequences. A perfect example is the Obama Administration’s plan to increase new car mileage standards, from the currently legislated requirement of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016 to 54.5 mpg by 2025, as an average across each automaker’s complete line of cars and light trucks. Carmakers reluctantly agreed to the new requirements, to avoid even more onerous standards, or different standards in different states. But the deal does nothing to alter the harsh realities...

Forget peak oil; forget the Middle East. The energy revolution of the 21st century isn’t about solar energy or wind power and the “scramble for oil” isn’t going to drive global politics. The energy abundance that helped propel the United States to global leadership in the 19th and 2oth centuries is back; if the energy revolution now taking shape lives up to its full potential, we are headed into a new century in which the location of the world’s energy resources and the structure of the world’s energy trade support American affluence at home and power abroad. By some estimates,...

North America's energy sector has the potential to drive a "remarkable resurgence" that could see the Continent become the new Middle East in shaping the global supply of gas and oil, a new report has claimed. Deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, tapping shale deposits for gas and oil and Canada's oil sands are among the ingredients that could see North America's production of oil and natural gas liquids almost double to 26.6m barrels a day by 2020, according to a report by analysts at Citigroup. "The energy sector in the next few decades could drive an extraordinary and...

Britain has decided to cooperate with the United States in a bilateral agreement to release strategic oil stocks, two British sources said, in an effort to prevent high fuel prices derailing economic growth in an election year. A formal request from the United States to the UK to join forces in a release of oil from government-controlled reserves is expected "shortly" following a meeting on Wednesday in Washington between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron, who discussed the issue, one source said. Britain would respond positively, the two sources said.

Remember that Barack Obama insists that there are "no silver bullets" to fix the issue of high gas prices. So when British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Washington for high-level talks and the discussion turned to gas prices, what did Obama propose? According to Reuters, holy water and a garland of garlic: President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron discussed the possibility of releasing emergency oil reserves during a meeting on Wednesday, two sources familiar with the talks said, the first sign that Obama is starting to test global support for an effort to knock back near-record fuel...

When he was running for the Oval Office four years ago amid $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, then-Sen. Barack Obama dismissed the idea of expanded oil production as a way to relieve the pain at the pump. "Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling," he said. "America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves." Which meant, he said, that the U.S. couldn't affect global oil prices....But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is considering a release from its strategic oil reserves, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Friday, acknowledging the harm that supply disruptions from Iran could have on the global economy. Rising tensions between Iran and the West .. have fueled a rise in oil prices, pushing benchmark Brent crude above $125 a barrel on Friday. "There is a case for the use of the reserve in some circumstances and we will continue to look at those and evaluate that carefully," Geithner said on CNBC television. "Obviously Iran can do a lot of damage to...

So much for the olive branch The odds of conflict with Iran continue to rise as it appear talks that could be the last chance to stop events from spinning out of control seem to be dead on arrival. Oil prices, which really looked beyond the symbolic Iranian cut of oil to the UK and France, seemed to start to focus a bit more on latest deal to save Greece and a surging stock market. Yet oil already up got another dollar spike when Bloomberg News reported that Iran’s foreign Minister basically said that talks about Iran’s nuclear program were...

The Solution to the Energy Crisis is Right HereMark W. Hendrickson  Saudi Arabia has long been the dominant producer of petroleum on the planet. Nature endowed the Arabian Peninsula with gigantic deposits of this vital source of energy. Many of us have lamented the quirk of nature that placed much-needed oil in the most geopolitically unstable region in the world.Although Saudi Arabia is the king of oil producers at present, there is another country that has far more extensive deposits of fossil fuels. Because fossil fuels are the most economical and reliable energy sources known to man, the country that...

“This is the time to deploy a responsible amount of reserves before it is too late,” Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the author of the new bill, told reporters. Markey's bill represents the latest effort by Democrats to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), a 727-million-barrel emergency stockpile of oil. But the proposal faces opposition from Republicans and at least one senior House Democrat. The legislation would require that over the next six months at least 30 million barrels of oil be released from the SPR. President Obama ultimately has the authority to release oil from the SPR....

Right now, the Obama Administration is thinking of doing two very stupid things. Let me rephrase that. Right now, the Obama Administration is thinking of doing two very stupid things that we know about. To whit: Tapping into the strategic petroleum reserve and attacking Libya. Let’s take them in reverse order. In recent days, it has seemed that the administration and its various deep thinkers have decided that the world will somehow be a better place if the American military knocks off Muomar Khadafi. Like we need another war. Like this new batch of Third Worlders will react kindly to...

As far back as 2004, there was worry that the Saudis were fudging on how much oil they still had in the ground. Thanks to Wikileaks, we now have a little better idea. The Guardian: The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels -...

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show. The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%. The revelation comes as the oil price has soared in recent weeks to more than $100 a barrel on global demand and tensions in the Middle East. Many analysts expect that the...

I am going to address a touchy subject in this essay, but I simply can’t ignore it any longer. I have noticed that a lot of people are finding my blog through keyword searches of “Debunking Matt Simmons.” About two and a half years ago, I did write an essay called Debunking Matt Simmons. Because of Matt’s recent claims about the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there has been a spike in interest over whether his claims related to the disaster are actually credible. So now seems like a good time to revisit the subject. Claims like "BP will...

HOUSTON - This month Iraq will finalize contracts with the likes of ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell and BP to develop some of its biggest oil fields. These giants are among the world's last remaining pockets of so-called "easy oil." They don't require ultradeep drilling or innovative production techniques, just the application of Big Oil know-how. No wonder the oil companies agreed to develop Iraq's fields without even getting an ownership stake in the fields and collecting as little as $1.15 per barrel recovered. Given the size of Iraq's undeveloped giants there are no technical reasons why within 10 years the...