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Opponents of drilling offshore raise the environmental issue. Actually, more oil is spilled from tankers bringing imported oil into the U.S. than is spilled from oil production and drilling platforms. According to the Minerals Management Service and the U.S. Coast Guard, 45 percent of oil spilled comes from ships and only 3 percent comes from drilling rigs and platforms. Additionally, the MMS noted that during hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which destroyed hundreds of offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, there were no major oil spills. The last major oil spill in the U.S. from a drilling platform was off...

U.S. offshore oil drilling is not perfectly tidy. It's only 99.999 percent clean. Indeed, since 1980 -- as MMS figures indicate -- 101,997 barrels spilled from among the 11.855 billion barrels of American oil extracted offshore. This is a 0.001 percent pollution rate. While offshore drilling is not 100 percent spotless, this record should satisfy all but the terminally fastidious. Ironically, in terms of oil contamination, Mother Nature is 95 times dirtier than Man. Some 620,500 barrels of oil ooze organically from North America's ocean floors each year. Compare this to the average 6,555 barrels that oil companies have spilled...

---snip--- One thing is clear: renewable energy is not going to save the U.S. anytime soon. I don't know why or how people see renewable energy as a short-term answer. Think about it, even with federal subsidies, tax breaks, and record high energy prices, renewable energy still has not made a dent in the energy market. Renewable energy might be a long-term answer, I can't say. I'm just amazed that people look at it as such an option without realizing how incredibly expensive it is. The federal subsidies and tax breaks still haven't made it very competitive and people still...

----snip---- Discontent is rising throughout the land, and Chávez’s popularity is in free fall. The president, who is more and more erratic and contradictory, has fewer resources to spend on remedying the situation and faces a unified opposition. Let’s hope that the country’s democratic forces can resolve what is a very tough situation for the government and put an end to a regime that has created nothing but unnecessary conflicts and greater poverty for almost everyone. ----snip---- After the oil stoppage of late 2002 to early 2003, Chávez decided to fire no fewer than 18,000 of PDVSA’s employees—almost a quarter...

• "Even if drilling works, it'll take a decade or more for the oil to flow." This is quite an argument coming from the Democratic Party, which has made keeping oil off the market a linchpin of its energy policy for decades. If President Clinton hadn't vetoed the idea of drilling in ANWR back in 1995, we'd have that oil on the market today. Ditto if Congress had approved ANWR drilling in 2002, when President Bush requested it. Even so, the larger point is false anyway. New oil will be flowing in some cases within three to four years, according...

With oil prices climbing, U.S. President George W. Bush asked Congress to end a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling on the east and west coasts. Matthew Trevisan looks at crude extraction on the high seas 1 Who owns what Staking a claim on the sea has come a long way since Pope Alexander VI drew a line in the Atlantic Ocean in 1494 and effectively divided the New World between Spain and Portugal. Five hundred years later, in 1994, under a new United Nations convention, coastal countries were awarded the right to exploit and develop all resources up...

David J. O’Reilly, the chairman and chief executive of Chevron, spoke about why Congress should allow more access to offshore drilling .... Q. Democrats say oil companies are sitting on unused leases and they should drill there first before more regions are opened up to production. A. What I would encourage the Democrats to do is to look at the facts. We should not be making these crass statements without facts. There are already existing limitations on leases. Already you have to use them or loose them. It takes time for geological exploration to occur. In our case, over 80...

----snip---- The reason oil prices are skyrocketing is not because there isn’t enough oil to satisfy demand right now but because the market expects that significantly more supply is going to be needed in the future to make up for new demand coming online from the developing world. These new oil supplies cannot be economically produced without significantly higher oil prices to make production economical and higher oil prices are also needed for consumers to cut back on their own consumption of oil. Another important factor is that the production in many oil-exporting nations has been in decline due to...

----snip---- As news outlets pointed out, most of the G-8 countries have little control over production. One, however, does, and it has leveraged that control, and its enormous reserves, to regain status as a world power. ----snip---- He does have a stern warning for Western Europe, however. The region has become dangerously dependent on Russia for natural gas, he writes. With its spreading network of pipelines, Gazprom now has the power to let Europe freeze if it so chooses. ----snip---- While the Europeans and Americans have sought to break Gazprom's pipeline monopoly by promoting the construction of a bypass gas...

Consider: The Brazilian government has a 58 percent controlling stake in Petrobras's voting shares and 32percent of its total shares, which means that some of the profits go straight to the government's bottom line, giving the politicians more money to spend on bribing their constituents. In the United States, American politicians do not benefit from a successful oil industry, since corporate profits go to shareholders, pensioners and employees; therefore Congress has a much greater incentive to respond to the concentrated power of the special interest group known as the "greens." There are plenty of other examples, says O'Grady: In Mexico,...

----snip---- Then there is the granddaddy of them all: the oil shale in Green River Formation, which goes through Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. According to a RAND Corp. study, there are 1.5 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels worth of oil shale in the Green River Formation. That is more than triple the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. At $95 a barrel, it was not economically viable to develop these resources, but at $130 it definitely is. Furthermore, Shell Oil scientists have already conducted small-scale field tests that if replicated on a large scale would make developing the oil shale...

----snip---- We believe commercial oil shale production in this region will come, and probably within 10 years. That's why it's so important to address the concerns The Post voiced 28 years ago about the impact of oil shale production on the environment and economy of the West, especially on our scarce water supplies. "In-situ," or in-the-ground, technology being developed by Shell and EGL Resources, along with a new approach by Chevron crafted by teaming with Los Alamos National Laboratories, may be able to solve those problems. But the companies doing that research say they aren't yet ready for commercial development....

Venezuela: Help wanted Output: 2.5 million barrels a day. Reserves: 80 billion barrels of oil,.... The plan: To increase its production ....... The challenge: Venezuela used to produce well over three million barrels a day, but output has fallen since workers at Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), the national oil company, called a strike in 2002. More than 18,000 workers left PDVSA after the strike, leaving Venezuela without the expertise necessary to keep production rates level. After years of exploitation, the crude in conventional oil basins is becoming depleted. The challenge in the Orinoco belt is similar to Alberta's oil...

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- You'd think this would be oil shale's moment. You'd think with gas prices topping $4 and consumers crying uncle, Congress would be moving fast to spur development of a domestic oil resource so vast - 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone - it could eventually rival the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. You'd think politicians would be tripping over themselves to arrange photo-ops with Harold Vinegar (whom I profiled in Fortune last November), the brilliant, Brooklyn-born chief scientist at Royal Dutch Shell whose research cracked the code on how...

Energy: Mexico and the United States engage in an energy dispute in the Gulf of Mexico. So why does Mexico want to protect and develop its offshore oil but we don't? On May 13, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., rose on the Senate floor to demand that arms sales to Saudi Arabia cease unless that kingdom "increases its oil production by one million barrels a day" — coincidentally the amount that would be flowing from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge today had President Clinton not vetoed drilling in its frozen tundra in 1995. In arguing that Saudi Arabia "holds the key...

The price of oil keeps climbing and Mexico exports oil. When that happens the government should earn extra money from the state oil monopoly, Pemex. But this year - so far at least - the government says there is no oil windfall money to hand out. The recent announcement by the Finance Ministry got the opposition up in arms. Politicians declared that the technocrats at the ministry were manipulating the numbers and demanded an explanation. The spat over the missing oil windfall is about more than government largesse, although that is certainly part of the issue. Under the law, a...

Pemex says there are billions of untapped barrels in Mexico's deep waters. But it lacks the capital and know-how to go after them. A bill being pushed by President Felipe Calderon's administration would make it easier for Pemex to hire the expertise it needs. But deep-water projects cost billions and can take a decade to come on line. Oil majors typically want a share of any crude that they find -- a standard industry practice forbidden by Mexico's constitution.

CARACAS, Venezuela: Venezuela's state petroleum company, PDVSA, increased petroleum imports by nearly 150 percent between the first quarter of 2007 and the same period this year, bank statistics show. A report by the Venezuelan Central Bank this week demonstrated that petroleum imports reached US$1.5 billion (€964 million) during the first quarter of 2008. The imports — which include diesel oil, gasoline and chemical additives for gasoline products — are the country's highest in more than a decade. A spokesperson for PDVSA said the company had no immediate comment on the issue. Economist Gustavo Garcia, a professor at a Caracas business...

The first thing Special Forces had done about Basilan was conduct a series of population surveys. SF surveys were a bit like those conducted by university academics; indeed, many an SF officer had an advanced degree. But there was a difference. Because the motive behind these surveys was operational rather than intellectual, there was a practical, cut-to-the-chase quality about them that is uncommon in academia. Months were not needed to reach conclusions. Nobody was afraid to generalize in the bluntest terms; thus conclusions did not become entangled in exquisite subtleties. Intellectuals reward complexity and refinement; the military rewards simplicity and...