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Oil trucking to Iran at crossroads as pipeline exports loom

Oil trucking to Iran at crossroads as pipeline exports loom In a dirt lot filled with tanker trucks on the outskirts of Penjwin town, near the eastern border of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, Ali shuffled his right foot restlessly and looked east toward Iran."It’s taking 12 days to get through the Iranian border this time," he said. "This is my longest delay ever."Ali is among the thousands of tanker drivers in Iraq’s Kurdistan region transporting crude oil into Iran, through the Bashmah and Parwezkhan border crossings, to the southwest Ir… This content is for registered users. Please login to continue. If you are not a registered user, you may purchase a subscription or sign up for a free trial .

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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IPR Strikes Major Gas Discovery in Egyptian Desert

Texas independent oil & gas explorer IPR announced the discovery of a significant gas condensate field in its Alamein Concession located in the Western Desert of Egypt.  IPR, operator of the Concession, pursued a new play concept for several years targeting the untapped Alam El-Bueib (AEB) formation in the Yidma-11X well.  The discovery well, located 80 miles (130 km) southwest of the city of Alexandria, encountered both gas and condensate at a depth of 12,000 ft.  The well tested 14.3 million cubic ft/day of gas and 1,000 bbls/day of condensate of 53 deg API gravity with no water produced.  This primary target of the AEB was discovered by IPR after subsurface imaging of high quality 3D seismic revealed bright spots in this region of the Alamein Ridge.  While no gas has been found in this formation in this region of the Western Desert, it appears that commercial quantities […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Rebels Press Attack on Key City in South Sudan

Rebel forces who attacked the South Sudanese city of Bor appeared on Wednesday to have driven government forces out of parts of the city, a strategic location seen as a gateway to Juba, the capital, after a day of fierce fighting. “Yesterday our forces did a partial withdrawal from the town but they are still fighting in the suburbs of Bor,” Col. Philip Aguer, a South Sudanese military spokesman, said on Wednesday. The mayor of Bor, Nhial Majak Nhial, said by telephone, “The government is in control of the southern parts of the city,” and added that many residents had fled after rebel forces killed civilians. As the fighting raged, talks to end the conflict were expected to start on Thursday in Ethiopia. Redwan Hussein, the Ethiopian information minister, said that both sides were expected to arrive Wednesday. But, he added, “Talks are not expected […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Old Rivalries Reignited a Fuse in South Sudan

JUBA, South Sudan — Few moments conjure as much fear in South Sudan as the massacre of Bor. Long before South Sudan became a nation, while it was still in the throes of one of Africa’s longest civil wars, fighters tied to a leader named Riek Machar stormed through the city of Bor in 1991, killing 2,000 fellow southerners in an attack that would lay bare the deep divisions in this impoverished land. Since then, the people of South Sudan have had periods of peace, compromise and even shared jubilation at the birth of their nation in 2011. Mr. Machar himself became vice president, apologizing for the massacre. But there was never a real and lasting reconciliation between the factions threatening to pull this new nation apart, and on Tuesday fighters allied with Mr. Machar charged into Bor once again. “This was a fire waiting to be ignited,” said […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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China’s manufacturing growth slows as demand for exports weakens

Labourers work in a clothing factory in Huaibei, north China’s Anhui province on May 23, 2013. Manufacturing activity in China contracted in May for the first time in seven months, HSBC said on May 23, in another sign of the weakness of recovery in the world’s second-largest economy Growth in China’s manufacturing sector slowed for the first time in six months in December, dragged down by weak demand for Chinese exports, according to an official purchasing manager’s index. The state-sponsored PMI fell to 51 in December, down from 51.4 in November, marking a four-month low and highlighting the challenges facing the ruling Communist party as it tries to transform the growth model in the world’s second-largest economy. “From the overall situation we can predict that the future industrial growth rate will decline, the export growth rate may drop and economic growth is still under downward pressure,” said economist Zhang […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Xinhua: U.S. oil boom most under reported in 2013

China’s official news agency says the U.S. shale oil boom that will make it the world’s top oil producer by next year was the most under reported story of 2013. The Xinhua News Agency, citing the International Energy Agency and experts it interviewed, said the United States, driven by the development of its shale oilfields, is poised to become the world’s largest oil producer by 2015. U.S. output in 2014 is estimated at 8.5 million barrels of oil a day. "The increases are largely attributed to the development of the oil fields in Texas, North Dakota and the Gulf of Mexico," Gene Panasenko, a financial consultant and wealth manager at LPL Financial, told Xinhua. He said this boom will help the U.S. become more energy independent over the next two decades. The oil boom story did not get enough attention in 2013 as other […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Average U.S. Pump Prices Poised to Decline in 2014, AAA Says

Drivers in the U.S. will probably pay an average of 5 cents a gallon less in 2014 than this year as refineries produce more fuel, AAA said. The price of regular gasoline averaged $3.49 a gallon this year, making 2013 the least expensive year to fill up since 2010, according to Heathrow, Florida-based AAA, the nation’s largest motoring club. Prices in 2012 averaged a record $3.60 a gallon and $3.51 in 2011. U.S. gasoline production jumped 4.3 percent to 9.72 million barrels a day in the week ended Dec. 20, the most in data going back to 1982, the Energy Information Administration reported on Dec. 27. Refiners have ramped up operations to benefit from a flood of less-expensive domestic crude oil as U.S. output reached the highest level in 25 years. “Our hope is that prices will continue to fall as cars grow increasingly fuel efficient […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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North Dakota Train Fire Adds Fuel to Keystone XL Debate

The derailment and fire that led to the evacuation of a North Dakota town has renewed the debate over whether it’s safer to ship oil by rail or pipeline as the U.S. completes a review of the Keystone XL project. “Any time there is an incident, you have heightened talk and scrutiny on oil transportation,” Brigham McCown, a former director of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said yesterday in an interview. “It will add to the conversation.” Public safety officials urged more than 2,000 North Dakota residents to flee fumes from the fire that engulfed BNSF Railway Co. cars carrying oil after a collision Dec. 30 with another train about 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of Fargo. BNSF is owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) of Omaha. The evacuation was lifted yesterday at 3 p.m. local time after health officials declared the air […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Another View: Worldwide shortages could lead to water wars

Get ready for the water wars. Most of the world’s population takes water for granted, just like air. But a Hindustan Times blogger said that in India right now, as in so many other places around the globe, drinkable water has become such a “precious commodity” that it’s dragging the world into “water wars to follow the ones for the control of fuel oil.” Climate change is drying up lakes and rivers almost everywhere. In Australia, for example, an unprecedented heat wave brought on massive wildfires and critical water shortages. As water grows scarce, more countries are building dams on rivers to hog most of the water for themselves, depriving the nations downstream. Already, Egypt had threatened to bomb the Grand Renaissance Dam upstream on the Nile River in Ethiopia. And as the Earth’s population crossed the 7 billion mark last year, more and more water sources are so […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Kunstler: The end of pretend

If being wealthy were the same as pretending to be wealthy, then people who care about reality would have a little less to complain about. But pretending is a poor way for a society to negotiate its way through history. It makes for accumulating distortions which eventually undermine the society’s ability to function, especially when the pretending is about money, which is society’s operating system. The distortion that even simple people care about is that the gap between the rich and the poor is as plain, vast and grotesque as at any time in our history — except perhaps during slavery times in Dixieland, when many of the poor did not even own their existence. We’ve had plenty of reminders of that in pop culture the last couple of years, including Quentin Tarantino’s fiercely stupid movie “Django Unchained” and the more recent melodrama […]

Posted On : Published By : ASPO-USA