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Very few offshore oil and natural gas drilling rigs will actually resume activity within the first month the deepwater drilling moratorium is lifted in the Gulf of Mexico, a top Interior Department official said Monday. "Even when the moratorium is lifted, you won't see drilling going on the next day or even the next week," Michael Bromwich, head of the Interior Department's new Bureau of Ocean Management, Regulation, and Enforcement said during testimony in front of the Oil Spill Commission on Monday. He said it would be difficult for the oil and gas industry to comply with new safety requirements,...

A high-level British offer of help to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was rebuffed by America shortly after the accident, fuelling fresh fears of political tension between the two countries over the disaster. A few days after the BP-leased rig sank on April 22, the Cabinet Office made a direct offer to the US State Department to airlift half of Britain’s 1,200-tonne stockpile of chemical dispersants, The Times has learnt.

Periodically people take a look at the plateauing of oil reserve discoveries and oil production and compare that to the rapid increases in demand – particularly as China and India become more industrialized. They then declare that “peak” oil supplies have been reached, and the world will soon be plunged into a struggle for the remaining supplies. I made this mistake a couple of years ago, when I also concluded that the “peak” was upon us. Now, we all know that something weird is going on in oil markets as the price of oil and gasoline is advancing in large...

The rise to prominency on the world stage of China and India has implications for the US hegemony in the Far East. Over the past six months, moves and counter moves have been being made by the major players in the region that all were motivated by one factor; the scramble for energy resources. There's no international etiquette apart from the legislation that prevents war, but US foreign policy which is clearly centered around 'serving the US interests' is being duplicated by the rapidly developing countries in the East. Manishankar Aiyer, petroleum and natural gas minister of India spoke for...