Free Republic

Bloomberg is reporting on the increase in coal company bankruptcies in recent years, due to the switch by power companies to natural gas and fracking, which has flooded the market with cheap gas. Driving this conversion is the prospect of new, draconian rules to be issued by the EPA on emissions from coal plants. Exports are failing to save U.S. miners. Slowing Chinese growth and rising competition from overseas, including increased Australian output, have sent the price of metallurgical coal, used in steelmaking, to a six-year low. Central Appalachian thermal coal, used in power plants to produce electricity, fell on...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday he was hopeful Russian oil company Rosneft and Cuban state oil company Cupet could begin jointly exploring Cuba's potential offshore oil reserves "in the very near future."

MANAGUA, July 12 /ITAR-TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has changed the schedule of his Latin American tour and arrived in Nicaragua for a brief working visit. On his way from Cuba to Argentina on Saturday, the Russian leader decided to make a stopover in Managua, where he had been officially invited earlier. At the Managua airport, he was welcomed by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. ‘Much is yet to be done to develop our relations, especially in the area of economy, but we have good base for that,” Putin said, adding that Russia and Nicaragua had long-standing good relations. “We admire...

HAVANA (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to help revive Cuba's struggling offshore oil exploration on Friday at the start of a six-day tour of Latin America as Russia aims to reassert its influence on the communist-ruled island. Putin was joined in Havana by close ally and so-called Russian oil czar Igor Sechin, the chairman of state oil company Rosneft, to finalise a deal to explore for oil off Cuba's northern coast. The Russian president also promised to reinvest $3.5 billion of Cuban debt with Russia into development projects on the island, part of a deal in which Russia...

If you own a classic car, the place to be Friday morning was the Mobil Gas Station on Woodward Avenue in Birmingham, MI. Where else would you find gasoline priced the same as it was when your vintage auto was brand new? For instance, the owner of a ’31 Cord would pay the lowest price, a measly $0.17 per gallon of regular unleaded, while the owner of an ’82 Pontiac Firebird would pay the most – $1.31 per gallon, a princely sum back then. “This is the greatest day ever!” declares Thomas Semaan, whose ’80 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray fueled up...

...the study provides the strongest evidence yet that the upsurge quakes in the past decade across Central and mid-America is at least partially to be blamed on humans. More than 300 earthquakes have occurred from 2010 to 2012 compared to an average rate of 21 every year from 1967 to 2000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Most have ranged from 2.0 to 3.6 on the Richter scale but there have been exceptions, including a 5.6 event in central Oklahoma in November 2011 that destroyed 14 homes and injured two people.

While the federal government ordered railroads a month ago to give states details about shipments of volatile crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale region, New York State officials haven’t decided whether to share that information with the public. The Associated Press and eight environmental groups filed Freedom of Information Law requests with the state Office of Emergency Management this week, arguing that it’s in the public interest for communities to know more about the shipments in light of at least eight major accidents during the last year, including one that killed 47 people in Quebec a year ago. The...

After over four decades, it looks like America is getting back into the oil export business again. For the first time since the 1970s, Washington has opened the door to sending more U.S. crude oil abroad. Of course, the United States has been exporting oil products for some time now. In fact, America is now the largest exporter of products like gasoline, low sulfur heating oil, and diesel fuel in the world. But until now, companies were hamstrung when it came to the raw material itself. Of course, there have been a few exceptions. Very heavy California crude, which has...

Around the world, the giant oil companies of the United States and Europe are putting the brakes on a decade-long spending spree focused on finding and developing offshore oil fields in ever-tougher environments. The reason: Soaring costs are outpacing foreseeable rises in energy prices. Analysts at Bernstein say oil prices are likely to remain stable in the near term, but they also point to a long-term uptrend, with prices underpinned by rising costs. They predict that oil prices will rise to an average of $132 per barrel in 2018, from $110 per barrel now. “The era of easy to find,...

The World Has 53.3 Years of Oil Left By Matt DiLallo |June 22, 2014 | Photo credit: BP. BP (NYSE: BP  )  has provided an intriguing update to its global oil reserves estimate in the company's latest yearly review of energy statistics. BP raised its reserve estimate by 1.1% to 1,687.9 billion barrels, which is enough oil to last the world 53.3 years at the current production rates. However, there's likely a lot more oil left in the tank beyond what BP sees today. America's energy boom surgesA good portion of the growth in global oil reserves in BP's report comes from the...

A key figure in covert Russian efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine is working for Russia’s GRU military intelligence service, according to U.S. officials. Igor Vsevolodovich Girkin, who is currently using the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov, has identified himself in press reports as “defense minister” of the self-proclaimed, pro-Russian “Donetsk People’s Republic. This week he called for Russia to send military aid to rebels in eastern Ukraine. U.S. officials said Strelkov is considered a leading pro-Russian rebel who is undermining stability as part of a major Russian covert action program in Ukraine. Officials said Girkin is a GRU colonel who...

The Kremlin on Friday denied a statement by NATO suggesting Russia was building up troops on the frontier with Ukraine but said Moscow had brought in more border guards because of security concerns. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Thursday that at least a few thousand more Russian troops were now at the frontier, and called it a regrettable step backwards following an earlier withdrawal from the border. "There has been no build-up," Yuri Ushakov, President Vladimir Putin's foreign policy adviser, told reporters. He said Russia was concerned about security at the border and added: "This means just the...

The federal government’s decision to ban energy development across a wide swath of Colorado and eastern Utah to protect the Gunnison sage grouse habitat has raised concerns the action would inflict economic damage. Although the Obama administration was not expected to make its decision as to whether the bird warrants the endangered listing until November, the Bureau of Land Management’s decision this week effectively puts an oil, gas and coal moratorium on 400,000 acres – roughly 90 acres per bird. The final decision was “pushed back until after the election, because when people understand the impact on jobs, people get...

In the face of the relentless dillydallying on the part of the Obama administration on the Keystone XL pipeline, Canada went ahead and starting exploring the potential of cutting deals with other markets in Asia — and yesterday, the Canadian government approved their own Northern Gateway pipeline to carry crude from the Alberta oil sands out to the Pacific Ocean for shipment via tankers. There has been some speculation about the possibility of the Obama administration approving the Keystone XL pipeline now that Iraq’s oil output is on seriously unstable footing (although, reality check: The Keystone XL pipeline by...

When U.S. President Barack Obama spoke briefly on June 13 outside the White House on the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, he ruled out sending in U.S. troops, but said that he had instructed his national security team “to prepare a range of other options.” While the potential use of force – most likely consisting of airstrikes in some form – is what made headlines, Obama also hinted at the fact that his administration was working behind the scenes to plan for a possible major disruption in Iraqi oil output, which accounts for some 3.5 percent of global supply. “One...

North Dakota has joined the ranks of the few places in the world that produce more than a million barrels of oil per day, due in large part to the rich Bakken shale formation in the western part of the state. The April figures released Tuesday by the state's Department of Mineral Resources showed the record tally. North Dakota had flirted with the million-barrel-per-day mark for months, but the harsh winter slowed the pace. In March, production had hit 977,000 barrels per day. North Dakota's oil fields now represent more than 12 percent of all U.S. oil production, and more...

The pipeline is critical to Canada, which needs infrastructure in place to export its growing oil sands production. Alberta has the world’s third largest oil reserves, with 170 billion barrels of proven reserves. “I did not see it nor should it be a proxy for the relationship. It is, after all, one pipeline. We already have a lot of pipelines that cross our border,” Clinton said

Men young and old piled into taxis, trucks, police vehicles and minibuses and drove noisily through the streets, honking horns and waving an assortment of weapons including rocket-propelled grenades, high-powered sniper rifles, Kalashnikov assault rifles and handguns. “Daiish we will never surrender,” chanted a group of young men piled on the back of a pick-up truck, using an acronym for the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which carried out a stunningly swift seizure of large swaths of northern Iraq last week. “We want to show the world that we can protect ourselves,” said Khodr al-Tamimi, a turbaned...

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Oil industry analysts are warning a brewing civil war between Islamic militants in Iraq could potentially send gas prices soaring here in the Southland. KNX 1070′s Pete Demetriou reports the price of crude oil has shot up to $107 per barrel – the highest in 10 months – on reports that soldiers with the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria captured two towns in an ethnically mixed province northeast of Baghdad.

n June 11, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reaffirmed the group's crude oil production target of 30 million barrels per day (bbl/d) that has been in place since December 2011. This target is slightly above the 29.8-million-bbl/d call on OPEC crude oil and global stocks during 2014 presented in the June Short-Term Energy Outlook (Figure 1). The expected 2014 average call on OPEC and global stocks is 0.3 million bbl/d lower than in 2013, with an additional 0.2-million-bbl/d decline during 2015 to an average of 29.6 million bbl/d. Growing non-OPEC supply, particularly from continuing tight oil production...