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‘Influence’ part of Keystone XL conversation

With environmental activists telling the U.S. government to shun the Keystone XL pipeline, the White House shifted the focus to "ideological" influence. The Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and more than a dozen environmental campaign groups held "protest vigils" Monday to express frustration with a State Department assessment on the Keystone XL oil pipeline. TransCanada submitted its application to build the pipeline more than five years ago. It needs federal approval as a cross-border pipeline. President Obama said he’d weigh the project against its environmental footprint and the State Department last week said it saw few problems with the pipeline in that regard. Amanda Starbuck, climate director for Rainforest Action Network, said in a statement protesters took to the streets in more than 270 cities to "demonstrate their personal opposition to Keystone XL." Groups like hers say there were problems cited by the State […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Flint Hills North Pole Refinery Shutting Amid ‘Enormous’ Costs

Flint Hills Resources LLC will begin to permanently halt operations in May at the North Pole refinery, Alaska ’s largest by capacity, citing poor economics and “enormous” costs for cleaning up soil and groundwater. The subsidiary of Koch Industries Inc. will take the extraction unit at the refinery near Fairbanks out of service on May 1, ending gasoline production, and shut the No. 2 crude unit by June 1, ceasing the output of jet fuel and all other refined products, the Wichita, Kansas-based company said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. It will continue to sell fuels at terminals in Anchorage and Fairbanks. The announcement follows the shutdown of the refinery’s No. 1 crude unit in early 2012 because of what Flint Hills described at the time as “challenging economics” and rising crude prices. Cleaning contaminated soil and groundwater has further compounded costs, the company said. “Our company has spent […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Vulnerable Senate Democrats Urge Keystone XL Approval

Four politically vulnerable Senate Democrats are urging U.S. President Barack Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, spotlighting the implications of an election-year decision that may influence which party controls the chamber. At a rally yesterday in Washington, Senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas joined Republicans, the Canadian ambassador to the U.S., oil-industry lobbyists and labor leaders to call on the administration to authorize the $5.4 billion Canada-U.S. oil pipeline. Two other Senate Democrats who face tough November re-elections — Mark Begich of Alaska and Kay Hagan of North Carolina — weren’t at the rally but also have voiced strong support for the project. “The president is in a bit of a squeeze on this,” said Stu Rothenberg, editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. Rejecting Keystone will give Republicans running against the four Democrats a “green light” to attack over a project that’s popular […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Suncor posts gains from Canadian oil sands

Suncor Inc., the premier developer of Canadian oil sands, said production set a record in the fourth quarter with 409,600 barrels of oil per day. Suncor said its production from oil tar sands operations in Canada during the fourth quarter was a record 19.4 percent higher year-on-year. For all of its operations, the company said production rose to an average 558,100 barrels of oil equivalent per day during the fourth quarter, which represents less than 1 percent growth from the same quarter in 2012. Chief Executive Officer Steve Williams in a statement Monday the company was taking advantage of the global oil market dynamics by exploiting as many transit options as possible. "Looking ahead to 2014, we have already increased the flow of inland crude barrels to our Montreal refinery and begun shipping bitumen to the Gulf Coast to capture global pricing on […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Refining Margins Fall, Income Drops Following Asset Sales

BP PLC’s fourth-quarter profit fell 25%, hit by lower refining margins and lost income from asset sales, as the company continued to try to recover from the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. BP has sold close to $40 billion in assets and taken more than $42 billion in write-downs related to legal settlements and cleanup costs since the Gulf of Mexico spill in April 2010. The company also pleaded guilty to a dozen felony counts in the U.S. related to the accident, in which 11 workers died. The result: a smaller company that is pumping less crude oil. BP reported its results after competitors including Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Exxon Mobil Corp. posted disappointing quarterly profits amid soaring oil-field costs and rising challenges in boosting oil output industrywide. But BP’s numbers underscore that it is still struggling with its own specific challenges—primary among them the fallout […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Suncor Results Miss Expectations, Co. Cuts Production View, Raises Dividend

Suncor Energy Inc. ‘s fourth-quarter results missed expectations, and it cut its outlook for production this year due to lower projected output overseas even as its oil-sands production hit a record high. Canada’s biggest oil and gas company by market capitalization also announced some shareholder-friendly moves, including a 15% increase in its quarterly dividend and an expanded share buyback. Suncor had fourth-quarter net income of 443 million Canadian dollars ($399 million), or 30 Canadian cents a share, compared with a loss of C$574 million, or 38 Canadian cents, a year earlier. Year-earlier results included an impairment charge of close to C$1.5 billion related to its Voyageur upgrader project in Alberta. The latest results included C$340 million in impairment charges and other items, mostly related to Suncor’s operational limbo in Libya and Syria. Operating earnings slipped 1.5% to C$973 million, or 66 Canadian cents a share, in the fourth […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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BG Reports $1.08 Billion Loss

BG Group PLC reported a fourth-quarter loss of $1.08 billion as it wrote down its U.S. shale-gas business and assets in Egypt. Despite the loss, the oil-and-gas company predicted it still would meet a target to be cash-flow positive next year. Production in Brazil is ramping up, capital expenditures are expected to decline and the first exports of liquefied natural gas from the Queensland Curtis project in Australia are expected for this year’s fourth quarter, the U.K.-based company said Tuesday. "Clearly we also have to address the near-term challenges we face in Egypt and deliver our plans consistently and effectively," Chief Executive Chris Finalyson said. The U.K.’s third-largest natural-gas producer warned last week that profit would be lower in the past quarter as instability in Egypt hit production and exports. BG also cautioned that low natural-gas prices in the U.S. made production from shale assets in the country […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Ukraine racking up gas debts, Gazprom says

Russian energy company Gazprom said top executive Alexei Miller grilled Ukraine’s vice prime minister on repayment of Kiev’s natural gas debt. Gazprom said Monday in a statement Miller met in Moscow with Ukraine’s acting Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Boiko to discuss "the issues of operation in the winter period and repayment of the existing gas debt by [Ukraine’s natural gas company] Naftogaz Ukrainy." Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office said Ukraine is already falling behind on its energy bills and owes Gazprom more than $3 billion, state news agency RIA Novosti reported. Gazprom in 2009 cut gas supplies to Ukraine because of contractual disputes. That left downstream consumers in Europe in the cold for several weeks as most of their Russian gas runs through the Soviet-era transit system in Ukraine. After Ukraine’s November decision to suspend association talks with the European Union, Putin cut […]

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‘Biogasoline’ from plant waste – Peak Oil

Gasoline-like fuels can be made from cellulosic materials such as farm and forestry waste using a new process invented by chemists at the University of California, Davis. The process could open up new markets for plant-based fuels, beyond existing diesel substitutes. “What’s exciting is that there are lots of processes to make linear hydrocarbons, but until now nobody has been able to make branched hydrocarbons with volatility in the gasoline range,” said Mark Mascal, professor of chemistry at UC Davis and lead author on the paper published Jan. 29 in the journal  Angewandte Chemie . Traditional diesel fuel is made up of long, straight chains of carbon atoms, while the molecules that make up gasoline are shorter and branched. That means gasoline and diesel evaporate at different temperatures and pressures, reflected in the different design of diesel and gasoline engines. Biodiesel, refined from plant-based oils, is already commercially available […]

Posted On : Published By : ASPO-USA
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Peak Oil Denial: Nonsense Keeps Rolling Along # 7

At the risk of starting a cat fight where truth may too quickly become a casualty, why don’t we more forcefully challenge those who deny peak oil (and global warming) and who do so for reasons that generally ignore reality in favor of narrowly-defined interests? Those motivations will ultimately do nothing but promote more eventual harm by denying the truths to those who clearly need them the most…. Of course, we run the risk of getting bogged down in he said/she-said arguments that quickly devolve into the lowest forms of ‘debate’, but why let those types of offerings go unchallenged? They feed on themselves, and it is tiresome and time-consuming to have to rebut all the nonsense. But if we don’t, uninformed readers and listeners have no reason to at least consider the possibility that there may indeed be other facts out there […]

Posted On : Published By : ASPO-USA