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U.S. Seen Joining Biggest Oil Exporters If Ban Is Lifted

The U.S. will become one of the world’s largest oil exporters if domestic production continues to surge and policy makers lift a four-decade ban that keeps most crude from leaving the country, a government-sponsored study shows. America would be capable of sending as much as 2.4 million barrels a day overseas in 2025 if federal policy makers were to eliminate restrictions on most crude exports, an analysis by Turner, Mason & Co. for the Energy Information Administration shows. That would make the U.S. the fourth-largest oil exporter, behind Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, based on 2013 EIA data. The report assumes domestic output rises by 7.2 million barrels a day from 2013. The analysis is part of a series of studies the U.S. government is performing following a 71 percent surge in domestic oil production over the last four years. Drillers including Harold Hamm of Continental […]

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Vestas Lifts Outlook After Orders for Wind Turbines Surge

An employee walks between wind turbine blades at the Vestas Wind Systems A/S blade factory in Lem, Denmark. Photographer: Freya Ingrid Morales/Bloomberg Vestas Wind Systems A/S raised its sales and income forecast after strong orders in the usually weak first quarter drove the backlog at the biggest wind turbine maker to a record. Shares surged to a five-year high. The Aarhus, Denmark-based company reported net income of 56 million euros ($63 million) in the first three months, almost double the 29.7 million euro average that analysts had expected. It also enjoyed a 13 percent increase in revenue from its services business even though the year-ago period was fattened with rare contracts maintaining machines offshore. “This has been a historically strong first quarter on revenue, margins, order intake, and return on invested capital,” Chief Executive Officer Anders Runevad said. “Vestas is making good progress toward achieving its profitable growth objectives. […]

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Left-Leaning Party Sweeps to Power in Canada’s Oil-Rich Alberta

ENLARGE Supporters of the Alberta New Democratic Party cheer as election results come in at election headquarters in Edmonton on Tuesday. Photo: Dan Riedlhuber/Reuters CALGARY—The longtime ruling party of Canada’s energy-rich Alberta province lost its four-decade hold on power on Tuesday, ushering in a left-leaning government that has pledged to raise corporate taxes and increase oil and gas royalties. The Alberta New Democratic Party swept enough districts to form a majority, taking most of the seats in both the business center of Calgary and the provincial capital of Edmonton, according to preliminary results from Elections Alberta. The outcome was a blow to Premier Jim Prentice’s Progressive Conservative party and one that threatens to roil the province’s economy amid a slump in energy prices. “We need to start down the road to a diversified and resilient economy. We need finally to end the boom-and-bust roller coaster that we have been […]

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Rail Executive Blasts Oil-Train Rules

ENLARGE Railroad industry plans to petition for a reconsideration or challenge in court U.S. oil-train safety rules. Photo: RUSSELL GOLD FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Norfolk Southern Corp. NSC -3.08 % Chief Executive Charles W. “Wick” Moorman said that the rail industry will challenge the federal government’s new crude-by-rail rules, adding regulators have “made some serious mistakes in the regulations.” The new safety rules could make shipping crude oil by train prohibitively expensive, Mr. Moorman said in an interview on Tuesday. “At a certain point, the economics are such that you can’t justify shipping the oil. The price to get it to the refinery is too high and the downside of that is that it will throttle the journey toward energy independence in this country,” Mr. Moorman said. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Transportation called for installing new braking systems on trains hauling more than 70 cars of […]

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The Keystone XL Pipeline: What Do You Really Know?

The Keystone XL pipeline has been on the drawing board for years. Photo: Amy Harder/The Wall Street Journal The Keystone XL pipeline has been under review by the U.S. government for more than six years. President Barack Obama could make a decision on the project in the coming weeks, though he faces no deadline. You’ve probably heard about this pipeline, but how much do you actually know about it? Take this quiz to find out. 1. What company is proposing to build the pipeline? a. ExxonMobil b. TransCanada c. EnergyFirst d. Enbridge Answer: B. TransCanada, of Calgary, Alberta, first announced it was going to build Keystone in 2008. 2. Approximately how many gallons of oil a day are proposed to ship through the pipeline? a. 35 million b. 830,000 c. 255 million d. 50 million Answer: A. By comparison, the U.S. consumes about 800 million gallons of oil a […]

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Investment in upstream oil production down 20% on year in 2015, says IEA chief economist

Global investment in upstream oil production this year is down around $100 billion, almost 20% lower than in 2014 and the largest drop ever seen, the International Energy Agency’s chief economist Fatih Birol said Wednesday, May 6. The biggest portion of this is in the US, Canada and Brazil, Birol told journalists in Doha. "Especially for shale oil, the decline rates are very steep. Investment decisions have to be taken in a very short time, as they are much more price sensitive", Birol said. "At the price level seen at the beginning of this year [around $45/barrel], there will not be many projects in North America that will be profitable," he said. This is despite declining supply chain costs which have made US shale producers significantly more efficient. "There is still a huge gap between the cost of shale and the cost of [crude oil] production in the Middle […]

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New Oil-By-Rail Regulations Are Big Win for Oil and Rail Industries, Won’t Stop “Bomb Trains”

via Shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission. The long-awaited  oil-by-rail regulations  released today [May 1] are basically a guidebook for the oil and rail industries to continue doing business as usual when it comes to moving explosive Bakken crude oil by rail. DeSmog  recently reported  on how the Obama administration has worked behind the scenes to help achieve the oil industry’s top goal when it came to these new regulations — allowing the oil producers to continue to put the highly volatile Bakken crude oil into rail tank cars without removing the natural gas liquids that make it such an explosive mixture. As we’ve reported, there is a relatively simple fix to end, or significantly reduce, the “bomb train” disasters, via a process known as  stabilization. But the new regulations not only give the industry a pass on doing this, they add to the “we need more research before we […]

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Russia Gas Fields Key to Crude Output After Sanctions Hit Arctic

Gasoline is pumped into railway gasoline tankers at an oil refinery operated by OAO Bashneft in Ufa, Russia. Gas condensate is more valuable than other types of crude because when it’s refined it produces a very high proportion of high-value gasoline. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg With Siberia’s aging oil fields slowly running dry, Russia is turning to a natural gas by-product to help maintain crude production and meet President Vladimir Putin’s target of 10 million barrels a day. As companies including OAO Gazprom, OAO Novatek and OAO Rosneft get new Siberian gas fields up and running, they’re also boosting output of condensate, a prized, ultra-light form of crude that’s a common component of underground gas reserves. Condensate is especially important now because it’s not covered by sanctions on Russia’s oil industry that have targeted Arctic drilling and shale projects. Production of the ultra-light crude will swell as much as 17 […]

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Mixed signals emerge for eurozone economy

LONDON (AP) — Following a solid start to the year, signs emerged Wednesday that the 19-country eurozone economy is losing some traction. While a closely-watched survey indicated that economic activity grew at a steady pace in April, a separate report pointed to a sharp drop in retail sales in March. Financial information company Markit said its purchasing managers’ index, a broad gauge of business activity, was 53.9 points in April. Though slightly lower than the near four-year high of 54.0 in March, it remained well above the 50-point threshold that separates growth from decline. The firm said the survey provides further evidence that countries that have made bold economic reforms over the past few years are reaping the benefits. Overall, Markit said the survey points to quarterly economic growth of 0.4 percent in the first quarter of the year, in line with expectations. "The fact that the rate of […]

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The Great Oil Game: Resource Crisis in Russia?

Weekly pageviews of "Resource Crisis." My blog seems to be having a remarkable success in Russia, but do the Russians understand the problem of resource depletion? Complex structures, such as states and empires, are always prone to collapse and they usually give little or no previous warnings. The collapse of the Soviet Union, indeed, had not been predicted by anyone and it came completely unexpected. In the present crisis, instead, Western analysts seem to have fallen in the opposite mistake, predicting the rapid demise of the Russian Federation. But that didn’t happen. On the contrary, the Russian economic system showed a remarkable resilience and it strongly rebounded after a bad moment, last year. (image below from Bloomberg). So, predicting collapses is always very difficult in a world’s situation that looks more and more like a Russian Roulette (an appropriate name in this context), but played with nuclear weapons. It […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple