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U.S. rail petroleum delivery up 18.6 percent for week ending Dec. 7

U.S. rail delivery of crude oil was up 18.6 percent last week from the previous week, the American Association of Railroads said. The AAR said Thursday 14,831 carloads of crude oil, or about 10.3 million barrels of oil, were delivered on the rail system last week. So far this year, 665,450 carloads, or about 465 million barrels of oil, were delivered by rail, a 32.1 percent increase from the same period last year, the trade group said. The Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the U.S. Energy Department, said domestic oil production averaged 8 million barrels in November, the highest for any month since 1988. An accelerating pace of oil production in the United States has placed a burden on pipeline capacity, industry officials say. U.S. oil production has increased in part because of gains from states including Texas and North Dakota. The […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Canada Considers Classifying Crude as High-Risk Good

Canada is considering measures to treat crude oil as a high-risk, dangerous product that would require rail shippers to have government-approved emergency-response plans in place, a government official said Friday. The initiative would be part of a broad package of measures the Canadian government will likely unveil early in 2014 to boost rail safety, the official said. The transport of oil by rail has been under heightened scrutiny since last July, when the derailment of a train in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killed 47 people. That train, operated by Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway Inc., was carrying crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken region. Preliminary findings by Canadian transportation-safety regulators suggested the oil carried on those derailed railcars was more flammable than its shippers originally indicated. Investigators also suggested the amount of braking force applied to the train, which was left unattended outside Lac-Mégantic, was insufficient for the grade on which […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Energy Secretary Calls Oil Export Ban Dated

Signaling a possible break with 40 years of energy policy, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has suggested that it may be time for the Obama administration to reconsider the nation’s ban on exporting domestically produced crude oil. Congress made most oil exports without a license illegal in the 1970s to conserve supplies at a time when OPEC oil embargoes produced long lines at gas stations and threatened the American economy. But over the last five years a frenzy of oil drilling in shale rock formations in Texas and North Dakota have produced a glut of crude in the Midwest and Gulf of Mexico states. “Those restrictions on exports were born, as was the Department of Energy and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, on oil disruptions,” Mr. Moniz said in remarks to reporters at the Platts Global Energy Outlook forum in New York on Thursday. “There are lots of issues […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Bakken Update, Is Production Slowing Down?

The Bakken production data published by North Dakota is out with October production data.  ND Monthly Bakken Oil Production Statistics (Bakken Only) and ND Monthly Oil Production Statistics (All North Dakota) . The below chart is North Dakota Bakken barrels per day and All North Dakota Barrels per day. As you can see it’s mostly Bakken and very little "the rest of North Dakota. Bakken Barrels Per Day   It looks like there is a pattern developing. I charted the month to month percent change in the chart below with a line indicating a possible trend. Bakken Percent Change   Basically I think you can ignore everything before July 2011. That is because that was the month the surge started, additional wells almost tripled that month and Bakken production has tripled since that date. From the  Director’s Cut :  The drilling rig count was unchanged from Sep to Oct […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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BP Still Paying For Deepwater Horizon Blowout

More Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill A little over three years ago – April 20, 2010, to be exact – a drilling rig named the Deepwater Horizon was drilling in the Gulf of Mexico when an explosion occurred and created one of the largest oil spills in history. The accident killed 11 people, and the drilling rig sank two days later on April 22. The well oozed crude oil and natural gas until for several months. On July 15, the well was temporarily plugged and completely plugged on September 19. The blowout of the Deepwater Horizon was a great tragedy in many ways. But what has happened to BP, the company that was the operator of the well, is a tragedy, too. For example, the Gulf Settlement Program, which was created to make monetary awards to people who had been harmed by the accident, has awarded millions […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Chevron agrees to explore Polish shale gas potential

WARSAW, Poland, Dec. 13 (UPI) — PGNiG, a Polish state-owned energy company, said it reached a deal with a Chevron subsidiary to explore for shale natural gas in southeastern Poland. State-owned Polish Petroleum and Gas Mining, known by its Polish initials PGNiG, said the deal was signed in Warsaw with Chevron Polish Energy Resources. PGNiG President Jerzy Kurella said both sides would benefit by sharing the exploration risks, including the possible costs associated with development of the shale gas reserves in southeastern Poland. "We could benefit from the experience of Chevron in the exploration and production of shale gas around the world," he said in a statement Thursday. Chevron said if the exploration effort proves successful, both sides would form a joint venture for further operations in the license areas. Neither company offered an estimate of the reserve potential in the license areas. The Polish government estimates it has […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Energy Crunch: Energy round-up: why the government should stick to its carbon budget

Photo credit: bryanburke/flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 license .  Three things you shouldn’t miss this week Cost savings fear if greenhouse gas targets are scaled back  –  Watering down the UK’s efforts to tackle global warming would risk wiping out at least £100bn in cost savings even if shale gas production takes off.   New shale gas drilling areas to be revealed as communities promised £100,000 benefits for fracking  –  Large swathes of UK to be opened up for shale drilling, with communities where fracking takes place to receive £100,000, even if no gas is produced.   IEA projection of global all-liquids production to 2035.  The ‘New Policies’ scenario takes into account policy commitments and plans that have already been implemented, as well as those that have been announced. Source: IEA 2012 World Energy Outlook. Paris, France: International Energy Agency.   Weakening the UK’s Fourth Carbon Budget has no legal […]

Posted On : Published By : ASPO-USA
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Inexpensive oil vanishing at alarming rate Add to …

The United States is awash in shale oil. Iran, once OPEC’s second-largest producer, is slowly ramping up output. Oil consumption growth in the Western world has been somewhere between negative and flat since the 2008 financial crisis. The “peak oil” theory has pretty much vanished, along with The Oil Drum, the bible of peak oil believers. Rest in peace. TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline. Or turn in your grave, for the oil price charts tell a different story. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude oil futures are up 13 per cent over one year. Since 2009, they have climbed every year except 2012. In Europe, the Brent crude futures are flat over the year after rising three years on the trot. Brent, the de facto global benchmark, trades at about $108 (U.S.) a barrel; West Texas Intermediate, the North American benchmark, is at $97. For the sake of […]

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Post Carbon Institute: The Next 10 Years

During the past decade Post Carbon Institute’s influence has grown markedly, thanks in no small part to all our supporters and allies . And we’re proud of the impressive list of accomplishments we’ve racked up ( see this ) in that time. Where do we go from here? That depends on what’s needed and what’s possible. Our mission remains consistent, but our projects tend to shift as global events unfold (for example, my two most recent books, The End of Growth and Snake Oil were written in response to the global financial crisis and the recent North American fracking boom, respectively). We have a general understanding of what likely will drive change over the next decade: peak net energy, climate change, resource depletion, and financial bubbles. However, how these main drivers interact with established economic and political institutions, growing population, and Earth’s already-strained […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Oil prices down as Libya plans to resume output

Oil prices were subdued Friday amid the possibility of new supplies from the Middle East after a Libyan militia said oil terminals could reopen. Benchmark U.S. crude for January delivery was down 9 cents to $97.41 a barrel at mid-afternoon Kuala Lumpur time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose 6 cents on Thursday to settle at $97.50. Brent crude, a benchmark for international oils, eased 4 cents to $108.34 a barrel on the ICE exchange in London. The Libyan militia that shut down most of the country’s oil terminals for months has said the terminals will reopen Dec. 15. Libya has been losing millions of dollars every day after production dropped from 1.4 billion barrels a day to a few thousand since the closure. Libya has said it hopes to increase output to 2 million barrels a day […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple