North Sea Brent crude oil futures were lower for a fifth day on Tuesday, trading at a nine-month low below $100 a barrel.
U.S. benchmark crude, down for a fourth day, was at its lowest level so far in 2013, as the market remained under pressure from signs of weak oil demand growth. Keep reading →
Low natural gas prices in North America have prompted many oil and gas companies to jettison their dry gas assets, Fort Worth-based Quicksilver is capitalizing on Asian buyers’ efforts to secure lower-cost LNG feedstock to attract joint venture partners for its acreage in areas like the Horn River and Barnett shales.
Quicksilver is in negotiations for a joint venture partner in its Horn River Basin acreage in Canada. The company appears to be favoring an Asian buyer with an eye to exporting natural gas across the Pacific. Keep reading →
Power generation technology giant GE is getting into the combined heat and power game in Germany, where they are looking to maximize use and efficiency of intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar with the help of natural gas. However, burning natural gas to generate power generates lots of heat energy that is wasted by traditional gas power plants.
“Our flexible J920 technology offers both high efficiency and reliability levels, which makes it the ideal large gas engine distributed power solution for industrial and grid stabilization applications while also minimizing the customer’s carbon footprint,” said Karl Wetzlmayer, general manager of gas engines for power generation – GE Power & Water. Keep reading →
Recent trends suggest that the Gulf Coast is becoming to U.S. oil production what Apple is to the technology sector: a dominant player beset by challenges to its dominance.
Meanwhile, the Bakken Formation in North Dakota and Eagle Ford in Southern Texas are playing the role of Google and Samsung – upstarts shaking up the status quo in the sector. Keep reading →
Enormous finds offshore Brazil have drawn global attention to the promise of sub-salt oil and gas, but Houston-based Swift Energy is seeking to attract partners to a sub-salt prospect much closer to home.
Swift is seeking deepwater players as future partners in a potential sub-salt find in the “onshore” US Gulf of Mexico, under its Lake Washington field, which lies in water depths of 10-15 feet just off the southeastern Louisiana shore. It says the sub-salt prospect could hold as much as 350 million barrels of oil equivalent. Keep reading →
Papua New Guinea is set to join the global LNG game in 2014 when the ExxonMobil-led PNG LNG project is scheduled to ship its first deliveries, but a major announcement today by InterOil suggests an additional LNG export project could come on stream in the Asian Pacific island nation not long after.
InterOil has been active in PNG since the late 1990’s and operates the country’s only refinery which supplies about 65% of domestic refined product demand. Profits from InterOil’s downstream operations are often used to offset the costs of the company’s LNG export project, a major long-term strategic objective for the independent firm. Keep reading →
Breaking new ground – literally – enhanced geothermal system technology is unlocking heat trapped deep beneath Earth’s surface and, for the first time, turning it into electricity on the U.S. grid.
The U.S. Department of Energy said an Ormat Technologies EGS project that it backed with $5.4 million (to go along with $2.6 million in private sector money) had boosted production at a Churchill County, Nev., geothermal field by 38 percent, pumping 1.7 megawatts of new power to the grid. Keep reading →
Summer driving season is officially underway and the good news is Americans look set to save on gasoline compared with last summer, but not by much.
The US Energy Information Administration just released their Summer Fuels Outlook and expect “that regularâ€Âgrade gasoline retail prices, which averaged $3.69 per gallon last summer, will average $3.63 per gallon during the current summer (April through September) driving season.” Keep reading →
James Hansen was a NASA scientist for 46 years and a prominent climate change critic credited with being one of the first to speak out about the issue. He recently left his position at the government space agency so he could freely address climate change on a full-time basis.
In this brand new video, he discusses his decision to leave NASA and suggests increasing the price of fossil fuels at the policy level can help accelerate a transition to cleaner energy solutions. Keep reading →
A reversal of fortunes is underway between major energy commodity markets, with global oil prices trending downward while US natural gas has been showing signs of life breaking above $4 per million Btu. In its latest Monthly Oil Market Report, the International Energy Agency discussed their view of why the recent weakening in global oil benchmark Brent futures prices might be “relatively short-lived.”
“By early April, frontâ€Âmonth Brent futures had tumbled to just shy of $104/bbl for the first time since midâ€ÂJune, and the backwardation on the Brent curve has eased,” the report said, but oil supply and refining capacity have been growing faster than demand. Backwardation is when prices in the distant future are lower than prompt month prices. Keep reading →
