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Fracking Guidelines Issued by API to Ease Community Fears

The oil industry’s largest lobbying group began a new effort to ease public fears about hydraulic fracturing after a legal setback in New York state and a voter push in Colorado to ban the drilling practice. The American Petroleum Institute, a Washington-based group that includes Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) and Chevron Corp. (CVX) , released guidelines for improving community relations as “fracking” extends to more towns, raising concerns about pollution risks. The suggestions will help “raise the bar for the industry,” David Miller, director of standards for the group that has guided the industry on well design and preventing spills since 1924, said at a conference call with reporters today. The effort will help oil and gas companies develop “lasting relationships” with communities where drilling occurs, he said. The document reads like an etiquette guide for producers moving into rural towns to start drilling. Companies are encouraged to distribute […]

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Shipping Firms to Add Arctic LNG Route

Shipping companies in China and Japan said they would start a regular service to carry Siberian natural gas across the Arctic Ocean to East Asia, showing how Asian demand for the fuel is reshaping global shipping routes. Wednesday’s announcement by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd. and China Shipping Development Co. offered new details of how liquefied natural gas will get from one of the remotest locations on earth— the $27 billion Yamal LNG facility being developed in western Siberia—to urban areas in China and Japan. China Shipping Development said its joint venture with Mitsui O.S.K. would spend $932 million on three LNG carriers equipped with ice breakers, to be built by Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co. of South Korea. Service is set to begin as soon as 2018. Once virtually impassable, the Arctic Ocean is now attracting interest as a shipping route because global warming has reduced the ice […]

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Why China’s Energy Consumption Will Keep Rising

Why China’s Energy Consumption Will Keep Rising In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was signed. This was to usher in an era where the planet was to tackle climate change, and we were to see an energy transition from dirty, polluting fossil fuels to their low-carbon alternatives. Instead, here is what happened. Global coal consumption grew more in the last ten years than it did in the previous forty. After decades of global energy consumption growth being dominated by oil and natural gas, coal grew more in the last decade than oil did in the last 25 years and more than gas did in the last 22 years. The comparisons with low-carbon energy sources is even more stark. In the years since the Kyoto Protocol was signed, growth in primary energy consumption from coal was eight times larger than for wind, solar and nuclear energy put together. This incredible growth […]

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EIA: Low-permeability formations driving Permian oil production surge

Crude oil production in the Permian basin has increased to 1.35 million b/d in 2013 from 850,000 b/d in 2007. Since March 2013, the Permian basin has become the largest crude oil producing region in the US, with production exceeding that from the federal offshore Gulf of Mexico region. In 2013, the Permian basin’s production accounted for 18% of total US crude oil production, said the US Energy Information Administration . “Although oil production has previously come from the more permeable portions of the Permian formations, the application of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has opened up large and less-permeable portions of these formations to commercial production,” EIA said. According to data from EIA, the recent increase in Permian crude oil production is largely concentrated in six low-permeability formations, including the Spraberry, Wolfcamp, Bone Spring, Glorieta, Yeso, and Delaware formations. “Production from these formations has helped drive the […]

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Nebraska Court’s Keystone Plan Could Bring October Surprise

The Supreme Court of Nebraska plans to hear arguments the first week of September in the state’s appeal of a property rights case that could block the Keystone XL pipeline, which will likely push any White House decision on Keystone’s approval until after the mid-term elections, according to people familiar with the case. But the forthcoming September arguments, first reported Wednesday by the Washington Post , could move the court’s decision forward according to attorneys close to the issue. If the justices grant the appeal, which would approved the pipeline’s route through Nebraska, before the date of the elections, it could be an unwanted October surprise for President Barack Obama . The president has been under increasing pressure this year to approve Keystone from the energy industry,  Republicans, and most importantly, incumbent Democratic Senators including Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Warner of Virginia who are running […]

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Shale Seen Shifting Flows at America’s Biggest Oil Port

For more than 30 years, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port LLC has been a symbol of U.S. dependence on foreign oil, pumping Nigerian and Saudi Arabian crude from the world’s biggest supertankers into underground storage caverns beneath the marshes of southern Louisiana. Now, with domestic production at a 28-year high, LOOP’s managers are thinking the previously unthinkable: They want to reverse the flows and send North American oil out as well as take foreign oil in. To be an outbound hub, the port needs financial commitments from shippers to build needed infrastructure, and even under the most optimistic scenario, it will be a year before it loads the first tanker, Barb Hestermann, LOOP’s business development manager, said by phone yesterday. Still, the fact that LOOP is considering the project underscores how shale drilling and oil-sands mining have altered energy flows in North America . “This is what oil independence […]

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Six formations are responsible for surge in Permian Basin crude oil production

Energy Information Administration calculations, based on data from Drillinginfo Note: Production through December 2013 is reported. Production from January 2014 through May 2014 is estimated. Glorieta and Yeso are separate formations combined for this article. Additional amounts of Permian production come from other formations not included in this graph. The Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico is the nation’s most prolific oil producing area. Six formations within the basin have provided the bulk of Permian’s 60% increase in oil output since 2007. Crude oil production in the Permian Basin has increased from a low point of 850,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) in 2007 to 1,350,000 bbl/d in 2013. Largely as a result of this growth, crude oil production from Permian Basin counties has exceeded production from the […]

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Russia in secret plot against fracking, Nato chief says

The Daily Telegraph has one of those stories which makes me wonder who really believes this sort of stuff and why anyone would anyone ever bother saying it – Russia in secret plot against fracking, Nato chief says . Russia is secretly working with environmental groups campaigning against fracking in an attempt to maintain Europe’s dependence on energy imports from Moscow, the secretary-general of Nato has said Speaking at the Chatham House foreign affairs think-tank in London, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Russia was mounting a sophisticated disinformation campaign aimed at undermining attempts to exploit alternative energy sources such as shale gas. … Greenpeace dismissed Mr Rasmussen’s comments as "preposterous". A spokesman said: "Greenpeace had thirty of its people locked up in Russian prisons last year, threatened with fifteen years in jail. "The idea we’re puppets of Putin is so preposterous that you have […]

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Twenty-First-Century Energy Wars

Twenty-First-Century Energy Wars Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ukraine, the East and South China Seas: wherever you look, the world is aflame with new or intensifying conflicts.  At first glance, these upheavals appear to be independent events, driven by their own unique and idiosyncratic circumstances.  But look more closely and they share several key characteristics — notably, a witch’s brew of ethnic, religious, and national antagonisms that have beenstirred to the boiling point by a fixation on energy. In each of these conflicts, the fighting is driven in large part by the eruption of long-standing historic antagonisms among neighboring (often intermingled) tribes, sects, and peoples.  In Iraq and Syria, it is a clash among Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turkmen, and others; in Nigeria, among Muslims, Christians, and assorted tribal groupings; in South Sudan, between the Dinka and Nuer; in Ukraine, between Ukrainian loyalists and Russian-speakers aligned with Moscow; in the […]

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Oil Prices Extend Losing Streak Amid Economic Worries

By Daniel Huang U.S. oil prices continued their longest losing streak in 4 1/2 years on Tuesday as investors doubted the strength of the U.S. economy. Light, sweet crude for August delivery fell 13 cents, or 0.1%, to $103.40 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the lowest closing price since June 6. The benchmark for U.S. oil prices marked its seventh straight session of losses, the longest such streak since Dec. 14, 2009. While U.S. employers added jobs at a robust clip in June, gross domestic product growth has remained sluggish. "Prices are affected by the ebbs and flows of overall U.S. economic health," said Carl Larry, an analyst at Oil Outlooks & Opinions. "We’re doing a great job-wise but not so much GDP-wise." In a survey by The Wall Street Journal, analysts expect that crude-oil stockpiles fell 2 million barrels in the week ended July 4. […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple