On the same day the Obama Administration put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline, two engineering contracts totaling $12.2 billion were awarded to two U.S. companies for work in the Alberta oil sands. One included a $750 million contract to a Chicago-based company for work on Exxon’s huge Kearl Oil Sands project, one of [...]
With the sudden collapse of the Qaddafi regime in Tripoli, the oil industry is hoping it can repair enough of Libya’s damaged export terminals, pumping stations and pipelines to get as much as one million barrels a day of oil flowing into the market within the next six to 12 months. But as I have [...]
Curious, isn’t it, how some of the largest shale gas producers seem to be drilling more for oil these days? According to Baker Hughes Inc., a major oil services company, last week the number of natural gas rigs operating in the US fell for a fifth consecutive week to a ten-month low. Just as the [...]
Boone Pickens’s plans to save the United States from its energy dependence on so-called hostile petro-powers is, simply put, full of hot air. The abundance of shale gas in the US will no more free the country’s motorists from dependence on foreign oil than have either the American production of over ten billion gallons of [...]
Just as BP has finally succeeded in capping the ruptured Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge has sprung a leak in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. 2010 certainly hasn’t been a banner year for the North American oil industry. The Enbridge leak in Michigan is a poignant reminder of the [...]