Just three years after fears of an energy supply shortage, executives of the world’s leading oil companies now foresee a bonanza of oil and natural gas on the horizon.
In 2008, concern that a rapidly developing world was eating through all its energy supplies helped push prices to record levels, with oil hitting $147 a barrel and natural gas topping $15 per million cubic feet. Keep reading →
Handling the pace of change technologies have wrought on the energy sector is a major challenge for the industry, but one of the industry’s leading technology and engineering experts has an unexpected solution: Stop worrying about the wrong things.
Dr. Nansen Saleri oversaw one of the greatest engineering and operational feats of the last century as head of Reservoir Management at Saudi Aramco, where he built on decades of experience to bring the company’s extraction standards to more than twice the industry norm and set the stage for an energy present that is far more stable than it might have been without those advances. Having garnered the industry’s attention and respect for his work in Saudi Arabia, Saleri helped found and became CEO of Houston-based Quantum Reservoir Impact, a fast-growing consultancy helping oil companies access more of their subsurface resources with new technologies. Keep reading →
Petrobras lets power generation contracts for fields off Brazil http://bit.ly/rAKV1r Brazilintel
Oil is a global commodity–it is easy and cheap to ship it around the world. That means that the security of its distribution network is just as important as the security of its supply. This distribution network–including port terminals, huge oil supertankers, and lengthy pipelines–is vast and costly. It is also vulnerable to conflict, piracy and terrorism.
About one fifth of America’s oil imports come from the Persian Gulf, passing through the Strait of Hormuz as it is shipped to our shores. Over 15 million barrels of oil per day pass through the Strait, a 21 mile-wide body of water vulnerable to Iranian anti-ship missiles. Iran has repeated its threats to close the Strait and is well positioned to carry out attacks on oil tankers in transit. The very threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz to shipping is enough to give the Iranian regime more leverage in the region than they are due. Keep reading →
Alternative energy sources and technologies have been the beneficiaries of steadily rising prices for most forms of fossil fuels over the last 30 years, with political interference and technology innovations warping markets and price signals along the way.
But with massive oil and gas finds currently under development, the future looks distinctly choppy for the host of renewable and cleantech companies that have emerged in response to high prices and supply-side shocks like the Arab Spring. How the markets respond to the potential for falling prices and huge expansions in availability from Brazil, Iraq and smaller players as well as shale gas development was the subject of this panel at the US Association for Energy Economics Summit in Washington, DC, earlier this year. Keep reading →
“The world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system” without an “urgent and radical change of policy direction,” the International Energy Agency’s Executive Director said recently.
The agency has been beating the drum for significant changes to energy policy since the appointment of Maria Van der Hoeven earlier this year, and the tone of the group’s analysis, meant to reflect input from and guide policy for the world’s developed economies, has grown increasingly aggressive in recent months. Keep reading →
Gov. Heineman: Pipeline Re-Routing is Nebraska Common Sense: (Lincoln, Neb.) tinyurl.com/7dzadjg @Gov_Heineman
Just how quickly domestic US oil and gas plays can begin moving products to market remains a vital question following the Arab Spring, when political changes across the Middle East and North Africa put one third of the world’s oil and natural gas liquids at risk, prompting stockpile releases coordinated by the International Energy Agency.
Planning for new infrastructure spending and other capacity is extremely challenging given the volatile pricing that dependency on a limited number of foreign oil and natural gas sources entails, Frank Verrastro of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says in this video, an edited version of his presentation to the US Association for Energy Economics summit in Washington, DC earlier this year. Keep reading →
With the 2012 presidential election looming, the White House seems to be postponing many of the hard decision in its environmental policy.
After delaying an EPA rule on ground-level ozone emissions from power stations in early September, and then delaying a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline this November, EPA said on Monday it will delay a mid-December deadline for greenhouse gas emissions rules on oil refineries. Keep reading →
Electrification As An Economic Megatrend: AOL Energy Week In Review
By Peter GardettDebates that have preoccupied and in some cases paralyzed growth in the US energy sector could be overshadowed by the development of a single megatrend at the heart of the global economy: the transition to electric drives in machines of all kinds.
While electric vehicles are the most visible aspect of that change, and with roughly 250 million cars on the road any switch from gasoline to electric is significant, the switch from motors driven by their own internal combustion devices to significantly more efficient electric systems is already occurring in many parts of the economy where the infrastructure and the focus on cost reduction already exists. Keep reading →