Category:

South Sudan: Fighting Threatens Oil Fields in Upper Nile

Fighting has erupted around Renk, a key border town in Upper Nile state. South Sudan says opposition forces supported by the Sudanese government are making a push towards oil fields further south. According to a source within the government, forces loyal to former Vice President Riak Machar launched attacks on government troops near Agon-Bar, northeast of Renk on September 18. The rebel attack initially forced government troops to withdraw from the area. The South Sudanese troops then counterattacked, forcing the rebels to withdraw toward the Sudanese border. Renk sits near several oil fields in Upper Nile state, the largest of which is Palouge. The state is responsible for around 80 percent of South Sudan’s oil production. Fighting has since spread to oilfields near Palouge, according to sources in the area. A Member of Parliament, who is from the region and asked for his name not to be used, accused […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Texas RRC Data September Report

The Texas RailRoad Comission released their Oil & Gas Production Data  with production data through July 2014. The data was actually released Thursday but was all messed up. They corrected their mistake Friday except for condensate. Then yesterday they updated everything. As I have stated before, the RRC data, for the last several months, is incomplete. Nevertheless we can gather some indication of what is happening. Texas C+C Texas C+C is still increasing at a pretty hefty clip. The EIA data is just an estimate of course but I think it is pretty close to what the data will show when it is all in. I have included six months of data to show how it is increasing month to month. Texas Crude Only Texas crude only was down in October and November but has been up every month since. The declines in the last few months is due […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Russia Pledges State Funds to Business as Sanctions Limit Growth

Russia will remain committed to developing its market economy as the state offers billions of dollars of aid to help the country’s biggest companies weather sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Europe. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev met with business leaders to discuss state aid to cope with the strain as Russia’s economic slowdown is exacerbated by the sanctions, Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said today at an investment forum in the Black Sea city of Sochi, site of the Winter Olympics. The government is trying to revive its $2 trillion economy, growing at its slowest since a contraction in 2009 as U.S. and European Union sanctions compound cooling consumption and falling oil prices. Concerns that the arrest of billionaire Vladimir Evtushenkov, the richest Russian to face criminal charges since Mikhail Khodorkovsky a decade ago, signal an attack on private business have intensified outflows. The ruble weakened to a record against […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Merkel’s Taste for Coal to Upset $130 Billion Green Drive

When Germany kicked off its journey toward a system harnessing energy from wind and sun back in 2000, the goal was to protect the environment and build out climate-friendly power generation. More than a decade later, Europe ’s biggest economy is on course to miss its 2020 climate targets and greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants are virtually unchanged. Germany used coal, the dirtiest fuel, to generate 45 percent of its power last year, the highest level since 2007, as Chancellor Angela Merkel is phasing out nuclear in the wake of the Fukushima atomic accident in Japan three years ago. The transition, dubbed the Energiewende, has so far added more than 100 billion euros ($134 billion) to the power bills of households, shop owners and small factories as renewable energy met a record 25 percent of demand last year. RWE AG, the nation’s biggest power producer, last year reported its […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

UK weather: Britain must be prepared for ‘worst droughts in modern times’

The UK must prepare for “the worst droughts in modern times” experts will warn this week at a major international conference to discuss the growing global water crisis. As the population continues to grow and water is increasingly scarce, suppliers across Britain simply “cannot afford to fail”, according to Trevor Bishop, the Environment Agency’s deputy director. “We need to have more resilience, we need to be able to deal with tougher situations, and we cannot afford to fail. The consequences of failure would be very substantial,” he said. “In the past we have planned for our water resources to cope with the worst situation on record but records are only 100 years long,” he explained. “We may get a situation that is worse than that – with climate change that is perfectly possible.” He is expected to outline five key solutions the UK needs to embrace to avoid critical […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

As World’s Population Booms, Will Its Resources Be Enough for Us?

There are some-more than 7 billion people on Earth now, and roughly one in 8 of us doesn’t have adequate to eat. The doubt of how many people a Earth can support is a long-standing one that becomes some-more heated as a world’s population—and a use of healthy resources—keeps booming. This week, dual opposing projections of a world’s destiny race were released. As National Geographic’s Rob Kunzig  writes here , a new United Nations and University of Washington  study in a biography Science says it’s rarely expected we’ll see 9.6 billion Earthlings by 2050, and adult to 11 billion or some-more by 2100. These researchers used a new “probabalistic” statistical process that establishes a specific operation of doubt around their results. Another investigate in a journal  Global Environmental Change projects that the global population will arise during 9.4 billion after this century and tumble next 9 billion by 2100, formed on a consult […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

U.S. Oil Futures Slip on Supply, Firmer Dollar

NEW YORK–U.S. and global oil prices diverged Friday as supply concerns weighed on U.S. prices, though both contracts posted slight gains for the week. Light, sweet crude for October delivery settled down 66 cents, or 0.7%, to $92.41 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices rose 0.2% this week. Brent rose 69 cents, or 0.7%, to $98.39 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe and rose 0.4% on the week. The dollar traded near multiyear highs against a basket of currencies Friday on the potential for U.S. interest-rate increases in the future. Oil is traded in dollars, so a stronger dollar makes oil more expensive to buyers using other currencies. "The U.S. dollar is helping the crude market go down," said Tariq Zahir, managing member of Tyche Capital Advisors in New York, adding that he has been betting on lower oil prices. U.S. prices have seen some support […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

WTI Falls Third Day on Dollar Strength as Supply Rises

West Texas Intermediate crude fell for a third day on rising U.S. inventories as a stronger dollar weighed on commodity prices. Brent futures rose on supply risks. Stockpiles increased last week for the first time since Aug. 8, according to the Energy Information Administration. The dollar gained as the Federal Reserve moves closer to raising interest rates . Brent widened its premium to WTI on signs of lower OPEC output. Gasoline futures jumped on surging Gulf Coast spot prices. “Oil continues to come under pressure from the idea that we have ample supplies,” said Gene McGillian , an analyst and broker at Tradition Energy in Stamford, Connecticut. “The dollar is throwing pressure on oil.” WTI for October delivery dropped 66 cents, or 0.7 percent, to end at $92.41 on the New York Mercantile Exchange . The volume of all futures traded was about 5.8 percent below the 100-day average. […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

US Crude Falls On Worries About Glut, Brent Gains

NEW YORK, Sept 19 (Reuters) – U.S. crude oil and Brent traded in opposite directions on Friday as a sell-off ahead of Monday’s expiration kept U.S. prices down, while discussions of OPEC cutting output put strength into the market overseas. With the two crudes trading lower in the morning, analysts and traders said much of the sell off in the WTI contract was a result of liquidation of long positions before the expiration on Monday. However, Brent saw a number of rallies through the day, pushing the arbitrage between the two grades to $6.74 <CL-LCO1=R>, the widest since Sept. 8. U.S. crude fell 66 cents to settle at $92.41 a barrel while Brent rose 69 cents to settle at $98.39 a barrel. "I think overall talk about OPEC cutting back production is giving some strength on Brent. The cuts are inevitable but who and how," said Carl Larry, chief […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Cheap Oil and Expensive Oil Tankers: This Is Contango

Energy During the last half of 2008, as the global economy ground to a halt, the price of oil fell from an all-time high of $145 a barrel to less than $40. A lot of people lost a lot of money. Just as in the stock market, though, the oil crash presented a chance to buy crude cheaper than it had been in years and might ever be again. If you had a place to store that cheap oil, you could make a lot of money when prices rebounded. Thus was born the booming demand for oil tankers, or any other place to stash low-cost crude. By January 2009, with prices still hovering around $50 a barrel, there were some 90 million barrels of crude in floating storage. The futures markets had entered something traders call contango, a fancy commodities term for the expectation that prices will rise in […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple