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 [...]
Why is the Arab world convulsing with social and political unrest when triple digit oil prices should be bringing enormous wealth to the region? The answer may be that the link between energy inputs and food prices suddenly makes soaring oil prices a double-edged sword in the world’s largest food importing region. Egyptians are about [...]
There are many ways that oil shocks affect the economy, and none of them is good. As the prices of gasoline, diesel and home heating fuel rise, consumers’ energy bills eat up a growing share of their after-tax income, forcing cutbacks in more discretionary areas of spending. The next thing you know, people are going [...]
The recently released base case that will be used in the upcoming Annual Energy Outlook 2011 from the US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) paints a future of cheap and abundant energy for the US economy over the next quarter of a century. But its underlying assumptions are no more credible than those [...]
With oil prices now already above $80 per barrel and likely to hit triple-digit levels within months, you can expect to hear a lot more about the role of speculators in the marketplace. It’s always easier to find a convenient whipping boy than to recognize that depletion and the prospect of ever more costly fuel [...]
It’s not its carbon trail that stands in the way of the Alberta tar sands’ picking up the supply ball dropped by deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. After all, tar sands fuel is no dirtier than coal, and Americans haven’t let that fossil fuel’s carbon trail stand in the way of its generating [...]