Free Republic

When it comes to reversing the economy’s fourth-quarter growth decline, shale gas is the answer, says Wilbur Ross, chief of private equity firm WL Ross. “The best way to overcome the negative gross domestic product figures that were just released would be to encourage the exploitation of shale gas both for domestic and for international purposes,” he tells Fox Business Network. The clean energy concerns that have stifled permit issuance for shale gas extraction can easily be solved, Ross notes. “The greenies worry that shale gas would drive the price of electricity down and make sun power and wind power...

Have our wishes been answered? Scientists have found an oil field which contains 200 times more hydrocarbons than there is water on the whole of the Earth. Time to wave peak oil goodbye forever … but before you do I should probably inform you of the tiny hiccup in any plan to develop this oil field. It is around 1,300 light years away. The scientists work at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and using the 30m-telescope of the Institute for Radio Astronomy they discovered a vast cloud of hydrocarbons within the Horse Head Nebula galaxy in the Orion constellation.

"I will closely monitor this situation to assure that the market can continue to accommodate a reduction in purchases of petroleum and petroleum products from Iran," he said in a statement.

What would you do if gangs of robbers roamed your neighborhood at night, breaking into your neighbors' houses and stealing their family jewels and life savings? You would arm yourself to defend your property. Or you would move to a safer neighborhood. But if the robbers formed gangs called Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, or the Natural Resources Defense Fund, and assaulted your standard of living, the Che Guevara Democrats expect you to greet them with open arms, and gleefully turn over bushels of your cash, until your life savings is gone, and your standard of living has been reduced to...

North America's energy sector has the potential to drive a "remarkable resurgence" that could see the Continent become the new Middle East in shaping the global supply of gas and oil, a new report has claimed. Deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, tapping shale deposits for gas and oil and Canada's oil sands are among the ingredients that could see North America's production of oil and natural gas liquids almost double to 26.6m barrels a day by 2020, according to a report by analysts at Citigroup. "The energy sector in the next few decades could drive an extraordinary and...

After a childhood spent moving around, Patti Gorcheff vowed that she'd never uproot her daughter. But she says an oil and gas drilling frenzy in her area has forced her to change her mind. She and her husband are selling the family home and fleeing with their 15-year-old before the drinking water becomes contaminated, said Gorcheff, 56, of rural North Lima in northeastern Ohio. She's heard the accounts from neighboring Pennsylvania of contaminant-laced water being discharged into rivers _ and of fears there that, despite officials' assurances, drinking water might be harmed. "I've never been so afraid," she said. "They're...

Russia, currently vying for the title of world's top oil producer with Saudi Arabia, claimed that new findings in its offshore Arctic territories have effectively doubled the nation’s energy reserves. According to numerous Russian media reports, addressing a meeting of the sixth media forum of the United Russia Party on 25 September, Russian Natural Resources Minister Iury Trutnev said that the preliminary forecast is that resources in the Russian Arctic shelf are comparable to those in mainland Russia, adding, “Speaking of long-term planning, these reserves could last 100, may be 150 years, but longer is unlikely. Humanity will eventually have...

Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be "completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century." "President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy," he adds. We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring...

THE EUROPEAN Commission yesterday issued its strongest rebuke yet to Turkey over its threatening behaviour towards Cyprus’ efforts to drill for hydrocarbon reserves within its own Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Unfazed, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan continued to raise the stakes in his row with Israel and Cyprus over hydrocarbon explorations in the eastern Mediterranean, vowing yesterday to stop them from exploiting natural resources in the area while also pledging to send warships to escort aid to Gaza. The EU, through Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule yesterday “urged Turkey to refrain from any kind of threat, sources of friction or...

China’s omnivorous energy requirements have been attracting increasing attention as of late, as Beijing attempts to secure any and all sources of power for its growing industrial base. Nowhere is this more noticeable than Beijing’s policies in the South China Sea, where Chinese assertions of sovereignty are unsettling the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, all of whom have counter claims on the various shoals and islets. China’s landward neighbors are also feeling the hot breath of Beijing’s mandarins, however, most notably its economic rival India, with whom China fought a brief war in 1962 in the Himalayas over...

Many western analysts have described the post-Soviet tussle for Caspain and Central Asian energy reserves as the new “Great Game, except this time around, Russia is facing the U.s. rather than the British empire. To a dispassionate outside observer however, what is most striking about the prolonged wrangle between Moscow and Washington for hydrocarbons, military bases and influence is the emergence of an understated sly newcomer who has managed to bag many of the region’s assets – China. There are many reasons for this, despite the fact that both Russia and the U.S. both seemed to hold winning hands. For...

An increasingly fractious maritime confrontation is developing in the South China Sea, with enormous implications for international companies interested in developing East Asia’s offshore hydrocarbon resources. Far from the radars of city of London and Wall Street investors, the clash has seen Vietnam emerge as spear carrier for its fellow ASEAN members on the dispute. Offshore drilling is the most capital-intensive form of exploiting hydrocarbons, but its expense and scarcity has also allowed technically advanced Western companies to drive hard bargains with third world countries over their offshore waters, as they don’t have indigenous advanced technical resources nor finances to...

The surge in natural gas production via shale developments and massive liquefied natural gas projects continues to change the dynamics of the global energy industry, according to a report released this morning by IHS-CERA and the World Economic Forum. Energy Vision 2011: A New Era for Gas, affirms what many in the energy industry have been saying for a while now — new gas drilling technologies and numerous LNG export projects coming on line are making natural gas a more abundant and attractively priced hydrocarbon. Natural gas provides about 24 percent of all global energy needs, but the refinement of...

Evo Morales, Bolivia’s president, has claimed a reinvigorated mandate for constitutional reform after a partial count of Sunday’s recall referendum showed he had won more than 60 per cent of a national vote of confidence in his government. The president is expected to move swiftly to seek approval for a draft constitution that would redistribute wealth from the hydrocarbons industry, intro­duce land reform and open his way to run for a second term. Addressing supporters from the balcony of the presidential palace on Sunday, Mr Morales said the vote had “deepened democracy”. “We are convinced that it is important to...

In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.” . . . Joule says it now has “a library”...

The chemistry used to make a rare argon-carbene cation may hold the key to hydrocarbon formation on Saturn's largest moon, claim European researchers. Detlef Schröder from the Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic, and co-workers have made a noble-gas compound by colliding argon with dications. Using experimental and theoretical studies they showed that bromomethane (CH3Br) can be ionised to the molecular dication CH3Br2+ - that can rearrange to the tautomer CH2BrH2+. The reaction of this dication with argon leads to the argon-carbene cation (ArCH2+).1 Schröder also made the corresponding carbene cation for other noble gases, including krypton and xenon....

A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe is suddenly flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico. And the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers led by Terry Hazen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ... the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.

Future Fuels: Our secretary of energy pushes bio-refineries and windmills to oil executives at an energy conference as the administration announces a three-year offshore drilling ban. This is a policy for economic suicide. They don't qualify as an official group of victims, but carbon-Americans, as they have been called, did not have much to cheer about last week, when Energy Secretary Steven Chu addressed CERAWeek 2010, a premier industry conference hosted by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. With an economy struggling to regain sound footing, Chu advocated a starvation diet devoid of additional fossil fuels that are to remain under...

China interested in Russian hydrocarbons; Russia aims to reduce its dependence on European energy markets. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's visit to Beijing earlier this month yielded commercial deals worth $3.5 billion and a sweeping framework for bilateral energy cooperation. China's interest in Russian hydrocarbons is motivated by a desire to meet growing demand and diversify import sources. Russia stands to gain from reducing its dependence on European energy markets and using exports to China to develop Russia's Far East. Oil integration. Earlier this year, the China Development Bank (CDB) provided Russian energy companies Rosneft and Transneft with a $25...

High gasoline prices and concern about energy security are driving entrepreneurs to explore various ways to produce transportation fuels, says H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. For example, though rarely discussed, there is a well-developed process to turn coal into oil: ï‚· China is already bringing coal-to-oil plants online, with plans to produce as much as a million barrels of oil a day from coal by 2020. ï‚· Commercial coal-to-oil plants have not been built in the United States because they require more long-term capital investment than conventional oil. ï‚· But the Energy Department...