Free Republic

With prices rising at the gas pump — and a court order that allows climate change consideration when developing the agency’s policies — President Joe Biden’s Department of the Interior announced on Friday it will resume plans for issuing oil and gas leases on federal land. Biden had halted any oil and gas development on public land in the early days of his presidency and the issue has been in and out of the courts since. The case is the Louisiana v. Biden, Case No. 22-30087 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth District. The Biden administration was...

The White House on Thursday claimed drillers have enough “tools” to produce more oil, while banks have cut oil drilling funds. “The president has been clear that he believes they have the tools they need… to go get more oil here in the United States,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki claimed when asked about the reduced oil production in the nation.

The East and West Coasts can’t hog all the excitement. While militant Antifa types attack Trump supporters in Berkeley, rowdy snowflakes hustle conservative speakers off campus, and masked hooligans occupy streets in New York, Colorado could be cultivating some Leftist violence of its own…in the cause of making energy less plentiful and more expensive. Last week, the Boulder Daily Camera published a letter asking, whether, if oil and gas companies drill too close to homes, thus “threatening our lives and our children’s lives, then don’t we have a moral responsibility to blow up wells and eliminate fracking and workers?” The...

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday reversed an Obama-era plan to collect massive amounts of data from oil-and-gas companies — information that ultimately would’ve been used as the basis for new federal regulations on methane. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said the requests made by the prior administration constituted unnecessary burdens on the energy industry. His action also seems to signal that the EPA will not pursue any new methane regulations anytime in the foreseeable future.

Investors may not realize it, but the Walking Dead is not the only zombie show running right now. The oil markets are at least as scary and have zombies that are much harder to kill than AMC’s popular program. While about 100 oil companies have gone bankrupt in 2015 and 2016, almost none of those companies have actually “died”. Instead, most of the firms are still pumping oil just as rapidly as before. That, in turn, has significant implications for investors in the market.

The performance of Blood & Oil, a soap opera based on the North Dakota oil boom, is not going well. The show saw its episodes trimmed by ABC amid tepid viewer interest. But the real life Bakken is also suffering from a lack of interest, a development that doesn’t bode well for the oil-producing region. The Bakken had been a key part of the U.S. shale boom over the past half-decade. But production peaked at 1.22 million barrels per day in December 2014. Since then production has bounced around, with month-to-month fluctuations, but is slightly down from that high point...

One reason Chilean officials may have thought the drilling could take far longer was that they were not familiar with the type of drill that carved the rescue hole. ... “To tell you the truth, I don’t think anyone had a whole lot of faith in us,” said Brandon Fisher, president of Center Rock, a company in Berlin, Pa., that supplied the Plan B drills. “They didn’t understand the technology.” Mr. Fisher and others lobbied the Chilean government to let them use the drills, known as downhole hammers, which have air-powered bits that pound the rock as the drill rotates....

Speaking at the San Jose mine at the end of an emotional day, Laurence Golborne, Chile’s mining minister, said that engineers had decided the first 315 feet (96 metres) of the shaft would need to be cased with steel lining as a protection against falling rocks.

Link only: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-08-25/oil-drillers-may-face-months-of-delay-even-after-ban.html

One of the biggest of the big oil companies may be responsible for the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, but Washington's response to the BP PLC spill would give an advantage to such major oil companies while threatening to put their small competitors out of business. Energy legislation that Senate leaders said they may take up this week would sharply raise or eliminate a $75 million cap on oil company liability for economic damage from spills — a change that poses no great threat to giants like BP, which is setting aside $10 billion out of its huge profits...

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The batting coach for the Tulsa Drillers was pronounced dead at a hospital Sunday evening after being struck in the head by a line drive as he stood in the first-base coach's box during a Texas League game with the Arkansas Travelers, police said. The game was suspended in the ninth inning after Mike Coolbaugh was hit by a hard-hit foul ball off the bat of Tino Sanchez and taken to Baptist Medical Center-North Little Rock. Phil Elson, spokesman for the Travelers, said Coolbaugh was struck by the ball on the right side of his...