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 [...]
Whether Hurricane Alex hits the Gulf oil spill or not, it’s only a matter of time before one will. Alex is, after all, only the first storm in a year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting will be an abnormally active one for hurricanes. In case you’d forgotten, blow-outs of deep-water wells [...]
A $10-per-barrel drop in oil prices seems a curious response to the ongoing disaster at BP’s Deepwater Horizon wellhead, and to its potentially devastating repercussions on future world oil supply. But when the Dow loses 1,000 points in the same week, there’s obviously something else going on. If the world’s economic outlook is the same [...]
Will the unfolding environmental catastrophe from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico become deep-water oil’s equivalent to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident? In terms of environmental degradation and economic cost, it’s already become much more. The real legacy of Three Mile Island wasn’t what happened back in 1979, though, but [...]
Like millions of others, I was supposed to be flying over European skies last Saturday night—in my case to do a couple of days of media in Lisbon around the launch of the Portuguese edition of my book,“Porque É Que o Seu Mundo Vai Ficar Muito Mais Pequeno.” Of course, I never got to Portugal. [...]
What does $80-per-barrel oil say to you? Three years ago, it would have told you that global oil markets were at record tightness. Back then, the US president was making a personal pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia to vainly plead for more production. And economists were worrying about the implications for global economic growth. Today, it [...]