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A lightning strike may have caused a pipeline rupture that spilled more than 20,000 barrels of oil in a North Dakota wheat field, federal regulators said in a report issued Thursday. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration said a preliminary investigation of the Tesoro Corp. pipeline break “points to a strong electrical discharge as the cause of the failure.” Damon Hill, a spokesman for the agency, said a final determination as to the exact cause has not been made. The agency based its initial findings on mechanical and metallurgical analysis of a section of the...

Turkey’s Zorlu Energy is in talks with Israeli firms over the potential for a pipeline to carry Israeli gas to Turkey, industry sources say, but the political rift between the two former allies is holding up progress. Israel is set to become a gas exporter by the end of the decade after the discovery of two major offshore fields off its Mediterranean coast - Leviathan and Tamar. Turkey, dependent on imports for almost all of its energy, is looking to diversify away from expensive Russian gas and could become a customer as well as providing a transit route to other...

Koch Industries says International Forum on Globalization report has glaring errorsA new report claiming to demonstrate a large Koch Industries stake in the proposed Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline is riddled with factual inaccuracies, the company said on Tuesday.The report says that Koch stands to make $100 billion from the pipeline, which is widely supported by the American public but has been delayed as the State Department weighs its approval.State must approve oil pipeline projects that cross international borders. Keystone’s proposed pipeline would transport crude from Northwestern Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast.A report released on Monday by the International...

Pipeline transport of oil is so much safer than other modes that resistance to it is raising risks, concludes a study published by the Fraser Institute, Calgary. The risk of a spill in road transport is almost 20 incidents per billion ton-miles, according to US data cited in the study by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Kenneth P. Green, senior director, natural resource policy studies at the Fraser Institute. For rail, the risk is slightly more than two incidents per billion ton-miles. For pipelines, the risk is less than 0.6 incident per billion ton-miles. Citing US...

There are believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters. Many of the groups are small and operate on a local level, but a number have emerged as powerful forces with affiliates across the country or formed alliances with other groups that share a similar agenda. The BBC News website looks at the most prominent. Big snip

When it comes to transporting oil, pipelines are the safest option, trumping trains and trucks, according to a new report from Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study is just the latest to make the safety case for greater reliance on pipelines, coming while the Obama administration weighs whether Keystone XL is in the national interest and even as Tesoro starts cleaning up a seven-acre oil spill in a North Dakota wheat field. U.S. data on incidents from 2005 to 2009 “show that road and rail have higher rates of serious incidents, injuries and fatalities than pipelines, even though more road and...

Here’s a little-known fact: The Keystone pipeline system has been transporting oil sands from Canada to U.S. refineries in the Midwest for three years — with no major leaks and, more importantly, no major complaints from environmentalists. The Keystone pipeline project includes four phases. The Keystone XL that has received so much media attention is only the last phase. Phase 1 has been operating since 2010, carrying oil from Alberta across three Canadian provinces and six states to refineries in Illinois. Phase 2 put a link connecting the Phase 1 pipeline from Steele City, Nebraska, to Cushing, Oklahoma, a major...

The proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. would make "OPEC obsolete," billionaire energy entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens told CNBC on Wednesday. "Canadians say they have 250 billion barrels [of oil]. That's exactly what the Saudis claim they have," he said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "You're sitting there with the same amount of oil available to the United States from Canada … as Saudi Arabia." "But when you move the oil through the Strait of Hormuz everyday, it's 17 million barrels," Pickens said. "The Navy is shepherding a cartel daily through the Strait of Hormuz. And...

A natural gas pipeline fire in rural northwest Oklahoma was extinguished on Wednesday morning with no injuries reported, and the company that owns it, Northern Natural Gas, is working to determine the cause of the blast, a company spokesman said. The fire occurred at 11 p.m. CST on Tuesday (0400 GMT Wednesday) in a remote and rural area in Oklahoma's panhandle, and could be seen up to 50 miles away, according to local media reports. No injuries were reported. About "a half dozen" area volunteer fire departments responded to Tuesday night's blaze, said Mike Loeffler, spokesman for Northern Natural Gas....

Kinder Morgan Energy Partners is tacking on 18 miles of lateral pipeline in the Eagle Ford Shale to carry crude and condensate from its DeWitt County, Texas station to a new facility it will build northwest in Gonzales County. The company’s $74 million pipeline addition would allow it to reach markets along the Houston Ship Channel and a pipeline that services a Phillips 66 refinery in Brazoria County. Kinder Morgan said Wednesday it struck a deal with a large producer in the Eagle Ford to extend the 178-mile pipeline in the South Texas shale play, but did not disclose the...

The August LPS Mortgage Monitor was released this morning. It shows good news and bad news. The good news (if you are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The GSE mortgage share (blue line) has risen since 2011. mtgmktshare The bad news? The percentage of mortgages that are “out of the money” for refinancing has topped 50%. Again. %inmoney The good news? The mortgage pipeline is shrinking rapidly, particularly in judicial foreclosure states. forecpipecl The bad news? Judicial foreclosure states like New York, New Jersey and Hawaii have stubbornly high foreclosure pipeline ratios. For non-judicial foreclosure states, Massachusetts leads the nation....

LIVE OAK COUNTY — At Dobie Ranch, brushy plants common across South Texas blanket the rolling hills: granjeno, tasajillo, hog-plum, mesquite, prickly pear. But where a new pipeline route slices the property, native grasses such as slender gramma and pappusgrass sway in the breeze, knee- to waist-high and giving a glimpse of what the land once looked like. Thousands of miles of pipelines are under construction across the state. And in South Texas, where historic cattle overgrazing caused thick brush to take hold of the land, the new pipelines provide a chance to replant native prairie grasses that have been...

Alberta’s carbon dioxide pipeline project has nailed down solid dates for construction as its main gas supplier, the new Redwater bitumen refinery, gets rolling. Enhance Energy needs to time its project to match the North West Redwater Partnership’s $6 billion bitumen-to-diesel refinery, which was officially kicked off last week on a large patch of former farmland. The refinery is a bit behind its original schedule, and is expected to open in mid-2016. For Enhance president Susan Cole, that sets her Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL) on a firm timeline. “We will be ready when North West begins, but we don’t...

New construction technology, stringent and continuously improving regulations, and years of industry experience make Canada's oil shipping industry well-equipped to accommodate increased tanker traffic on the West Coast should new pipeline projects proceed, concludes the leading independent consulting firm IHS CERA. In addition, should an incident occur, Canada has access to more than $1.3-billion in ompensation, exceeding what is generally available internationally, says the IHS CERA report, Assessing Marine Transport for Oil Sands on Canada's West Coast. "There have been a great many questions from the public asking what it would mean to ship more crude oil off Canada's West...

It’s now been just over five years since TransCanada first filed an application for a presidential permit to build a cross-border pipeline, but that hasn’t done anything to temper the radical eco-lobbies’ relentlessly combative campaign based on nothing more than untenable arguments and outrageous outrage. Points for their steadfast commitment, I suppose, but those points are completely negated by these out-of-touch green groups’ and millionaire donors‘ refusal to contend with the facts that the southern portions of the Keystone pipeline are already in operation or nearly complete, that the pipeline will be used to ship domestic oil too, and that...

Pipeline operators have been roaring into public markets in search of badly needed capital, diving into an untapped money pool as the country grapples with a lack of energy transportation infrastructure. Yield-starved investors, bouncing from low interest rates on bonds to a choppy stock market, have appeared happy to fork over the millions that midstream companies — most of them tax-advantaged master limited partnerships — have asked for in the past year. And based on the market’s momentum, the industry could see five to 10 more similar public offerings announced before the year is out, said Joe Dunleavy, a partner...

Both the Alberta and federal governments see a West Coast pipeline as crucial to opening Asia as a large market for Canadian energy resources.

“With a subtle motion of the hand”, China took away the Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India (TAPI) pipeline project from the USA and became yesterday the chief controller of gas resources in Central and South Asia. Somebody else’s ideas and plans have been expropriated by means of contract for sale of 25 billion cubic meters of gas per year concluded between State Concern Turkmengas and Chinese Company CNPC. The deal will increase the total volume of Turkmen gas supplied to China up to 65 billion cubic meters. At the same time, the agreement is achieved on the planned new direction of Turkmenistan–China pipeline (D...

PHILADELPHIA – Is the reported willingness of Arab Gulf states to fund a U.S. military campaign in Syria really about major oil and gas interests that run through the country? The potential for trillions of dollars of energy revenue in deals that snake through Syrian territory may be a motivating factor for the U.S., Russia, Turkey and Arab states in the current Syria crisis.

CALGARY • An anti-Keystone XL pipeline commercial funded by President Barack Obama supporter and hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer confirms what many Canadians have long suspected — American anti-oil activists have gone mad. The commercial was intended to be aired Tuesday evening on WRC-TV, an affiliate of NBC in Washington, D.C., to coincide with the president’s appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The commercial is so offensive the station refused to air it. While intended as a parody, it insults TransCanada Corp. CEO Russ Girling, whose company is proposing Keystone XL; it’s a low blow to Canada; and it...