Free Republic

Once thing's for sure. Mitt Romney didn't send his money down to the Cayman Islands to work on its tan. The former Massachusetts governor has been criticized by some for having some of his vast fortune in the Caribbean offshore banking center. Yes, it was politically clumsy. But it was not uncommon, and -- assuming he has filed all the right disclosures -- it was perfectly legal. But if you're not running for president, and don't have to worry about public relations, what are the legitimate reasons for moving money offshore? I spoke to Jim Duggan, a partner at Chicago...

Switzerland is in the unfortunate position of being bullied and harassed by the U.S. government. The crux of the problem is that the United States arguably has the world's worst tax system for international activity, and this creates conflict with other nations, particularly ones that have good tax laws that attract investment. This has resulted in a number of different attacks against Swiss sovereignty. On the multilateral front, the Obama Administration is actively supporting the anti-tax competition project of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. On the unilateral front, the United States is imposing onerous laws on the entire...

It's the billion-dollar question in Alaska for 2012: Will this be the year Shell Oil begins large-scale offshore exploratory drilling in Arctic waters? Two months into 2012, the oil giant is beyond the lead time it said it needed to assemble the flotilla of support vessels that must accompany drill ships to leases in the remote Chukchi and Beaufort seas. But Shell Alaska Vice President Pete Slaiby remains hopeful drilling can begin when Arctic Ocean ice melts this summer, even as he awaits a green light from regulators. "There is clearly more certainty with the regulatory process than we've had...

I'm live at Freedom Fest's Global Financial Summit 2012 in the Bahamas. Trevor Bradley of Georgetown Trust joins me to discuss global banking jurisdictions. Georgetown Trust specializes in helping you obtain asset protection, management, and diversification. All of their work is offshore and is protected with respect to privacy and confidentiality. Trevor and I agree, Belize is one of the best banking jurisdictions out there. Belize has never had a banking failure in its history, and banks in Belize are regulated to keep a 24% liquidity rate all year round. You need to consider offshoring a portion of your wealth....

The Obama campaign and Democrats see the revelations about Mitt Romney’s offshoring as a boost to their central case: That Romney is the walking embodiment of the reckless, unfettered, profits-at-all costs capitalism that caused the crisis and helped rig the economy against the middle class, in favor of the rich. They will argue that Romney’s private sector conduct is a preview of the priorities, philosophy and view of capitalism that he’d bring to the presidency. On a conference call with liberal bloggers just now, Obama campaign officials sketched out the case they’ll be making about Romney’s Bain days, his offshoring,...

Throughout the months-long 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists expressed surprise at the development and relatively speedy disappearance of giant plumes of subsea oil and gas that jetted from the wellhead and refused to surface. A new study explains how bacteria degraded the plumes so efficiently: A succession of hydrocarbon-noshing species mushroomed because their movable feasts were repeatedly replenished. Only about 15 percent of the BP gusher floated up to form giant surface slicks, a second new study finds. Natural gas constituents and dissolvable chemicals amounting to twice that mass remained near the seafloor, creating the...

Today, I’m going to say some nice things about BP and some not so nice things about the lawyers who are suing BP. Please don’t spill your coffee. As horrific as the Deepwater Horizon accident was in April 2010 — killing 11 rig employees, while pouring millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — BP has performed quite admirably in its aftermath. It has spared no expense in cleaning up the oil. It has set aside $1 billion to restore the environment and coastal ecosystem. It underwrote an advertising campaign to lure tourists back to the Gulf...

Standing in front of a brightly coloured, 3-D image of the geology far below the floor of the Chukchi Sea, Steve Phelps pointed to the “giant opportunity” that has prompted Shell to pour billions of dollars into the Alaska Arctic. “Burger — that’s the name you are going to get to know,” Phelps recently told reporters gathered here to learn about the huge oil company’s plans and promises for Alaska. Phelps is Shell’s Alaska exploration manager, a geologist whose job it is to find big oil. The Burger field, part of a Shell naming theme that revolved around junk food,...

4 Dead, 49 Missing After Arctic Oil Rig Sinks18 December 2011 By Khristina Narizhnaya At least four people died when the floating Kolskaya oil rig overturned and sank with 67 people on board in the stormy Sea of Okhotsk as it was being towed to shore, 200 kilometers off Sakhalin Island. Fourteen people survived with minor injuries and 49 were reported missing late Sunday, the Transportation Ministry said. Four survivors were flown to the Nogliki Airport on Sakhalin Island. The Kolskaya, owned by state-owned offshore drilling company Arktikmorneftegazrazvedka, was being transported to Sakhalin after testing the Pervoocherednaya deep-sea oil well....

SAO PAULO—A Brazilian federal prosecutor on Wednesday asked a judge to shut down all Chevron Corp. and Transocean Ltd. operations in Brazil in a lawsuit that seeks some 20 billion Brazilian reais ($11 billion) in damages from the companies, the latest legal broadside to the firms since oil leaked from a well they operate in early November. In a statement announcing the lawsuit, the prosecutor's office in Campos, a city in Rio de Janeiro state, said Chevron and Transocean "showed a lack of planning and environmental management," by allowing the leak, which authorities say allowed at least 2,400 .

Environmentalists have opened a new front in their campaign to block Shell’s planned drilling in Arctic waters near Alaska, by challenging the government’s decision to issue the company essential air pollution permits for some of the work. At issue are Clean Air Act permits the Environmental Protection Agency issued last month for Shell Oil Co.’s Kulluk drillship and support vessels, which the firm plans to use while working on exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas starting next summer. Ten Alaskan and environmental groups appealed those permits before the EPA’s administrative Environmental Appeals Board on Monday. That builds on...

Energy Policy: Killing the Keystone XL pipeline may help one of the world's richest men get richer. North Dakota's booming oil fields will now grow more dependent on a railroad the president's economic guru just bought. Stop us if you see a pattern here. About the time George Soros — Hungarian billionaire and key donor to leftist groups and the Democratic Party — invested heavily in the stock of the state-run Brazilian oil company Petrobras, President Obama was curbing U.S. offshore oil production and the U.S. Export-Import Bank announced a $2 billion loan to Petrobras to finance deep-water drilling off...

Shell Oil Company has broken its previous record for the world’s deepest underwater well, the company announced today. A well in the Gulf of Mexico has set a global record for oil production in deep water, Shell Oil Co. said Thursday. Shell says it is producing oil from a well 9,627 feet below the surface of the Gulf, a depth more than six times greater than the Empire State Building’s height. It exceeds by 271 feet the depth of the previous record-holder, also a Shell project in the Gulf. Both wells operate through the Perdido drilling and production platform, 200...

The Obama administration is paving the way for seismic surveys of the Atlantic Ocean that will reveal the amount of oil and natural gas that exist off the East Coast, a top Interior Department official said Tuesday. Speaking at the Platts Energy Podium, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Director Tommy Beaudreau said the department is conducting an environmental review of the surveys and should release a draft of that review by next summer. The seismic surveys "will play a tremendous part in informing future decisions about whether or not the resource potential in that area is such that leasing activity...

Oil industry leaders and their Capitol Hill allies complained Tuesday that the Obama administration’s plan to hike the minimum bid for offshore drilling leases and shorten the duration of those contracts will discourage companies from making bets on marginal fields in the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately curb domestic energy production. At issue is the Interior Department’s decision to boost the minimum bid companies must offer for deep-water tracts from $37.50 per acre to $100, while simultaneously shrinking the length of most of those leases from 10 to seven years. The move is designed to spur companies to diligently develop...

Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Director Tommy P. Beaudreau announced that BOEM will hold the first oil and natural gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010. This oil and natural gas sale, Sale 218, trails BOEM’s completion of a supplemental environmental impact statement analyzing the effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill on the western Gulf of Mexico. The last lease sale, WPA Gulf of Mexico Lease Sale 215, was cancelled on May 27, 2010. The Department of Interior said the cancellation allowed time to...

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers today blasted the Obama administration for not doing more to block offshore drilling off the island nation’s coast. “We are extremely concerned over what seems to be a lack of a coordinated effort by the administration to prevent a state sponsor of terrorism . . . from engaging in risky deep-sea oil drilling projects that will harm U.S. interests as well as extend another economic lifeline to the Cuban regime,” the lawmakers, which are all of Cuban descent, said in a letter to President Barack Obama. The letter signers, Reps. David Rivera, R-Fla., Mario Diaz-Balart,...

The federal government today approved BP’s plans to drill new deep-water wells in the Gulf of Mexico, signing off on a broad offshore exploration plan for the first time since the lethal blowout of the company’s Macondo well last year. Federal regulators at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management okayed the British oil company’s revisions to a previously approved drilling plan for its Kaskida prospect about 192 miles off the Louisiana coast. The move expands BP’s government-approved 2008 plan to drill up to five wells at the site by allowing the company to drill two more wells and change the...

As state, local and federal officials brace for a major offshore drilling operation to begin between Cuba in Key West in December, another exploratory well may be drilled a year later in the Bahamas. The Bahamian and Cuban governments on Oct. 3 signed an agreement delimiting the two nations’ maritime borders after nearly 40 years of negotiations. The move cleared a major obstacle in the way of the Bahamas’ oil exploration goals since leases identified for their potential oil finds are near Cuban waters.

A Chinese-made oil rig is on schedule to arrive off Cuba and begin drilling before the end of 2011, a spokesman for Spanish oil company Repsol YPF said Thursday. Spokesman Kristian Rix would neither confirm nor deny recent reports of delays as the Scarabeo-9 rig travels to the Caribbean island, but he said the project has always been based on a window of time and things are still on schedule. He said it’s impossible to predict exact dates for such a complex undertaking as transporting the huge offshore rig, which is capable of housing up to 200 workers.

One year ago today, the Obama administration lifted the ban on most deep-water drilling that was temporarily imposed after the Gulf oil spill. The House Natural Resources Committee is marking the occasion with a hearing focused on examining the lingering effects of that five-month moratorium. Panel Chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., said the administration is dragging its feet in issuing permits to drill offshore, and those approvals haven’t yet met a pre-spill pace. “The Obama administration’s inability or refusal to issue permits in a timely and efficient manner (even) after the official moratorium was lifted resulted in lost jobs and significant...

Spagnoletti alleges that a standby ship that was in place to take the workers away in case of trouble left without them, knowing the liftboat had been crippled by the storm and the workers had already called for help. He said the standby ship was still in the area when the workers went into the water. “The vessel didn’t stand by. It just took off,” he said, adding the workers should have been evacuated ahead of the storm. Spagnoletti said the standby vessel left because its crew was getting seasick and wanted to go back to shore. The men tried...

The company formed by major oil companies to handle future subsea well blowouts is adding a new piece to its system. The Marine Well Containment Company took delivery of a new Aframax tanker, the “Eagle Texas,” to serve as one of two dedicated vessels that will process and store oil as it is being recovered from a subsea blowout. The Eagle Texas was commissioned at a recent ceremony in Takamatsu, Japan and will soon undergo conversion and modification before come to the Gulf of Mexico. The tanker will be operated by AET Tanker Holdings. “This tanker is critical to our...

Seven of 10 oil workers missing in the Gulf of Mexico were found alive Sunday, according to Mexico’s state oil company, three days after evacuating their disabled rig in a tropical storm and escaping in an enclosed life raft. Two bodies also were found but have yet to be identified, and rescuers are still searching for one worker who remains missing, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, said in a statement. Pemex identified the survivors as two Americans, Jeremy Parfait and Ted Derise, Jr., both of Louisiana, Kham Nadimuzzaman of Bangladesh and Mexicans Ruben Velasquez, Eleaquin Lopez, Luis Escobar and Ruben Lopez...

BP has evacuated nonessential personnel from three of its production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico due to Tropical Storm Nate. BP spokesman Daren Beaudo said personnel have been evacuated from the Mad Dog, Holstein and Atlantis platforms in the southern Green Canyon section of the Gulf of Mexico. The storm is expected to move toward the southern tip of Texas but will not make landfall until late Sunday or Monday, according to the National Hurricane Center.

BP says it has drilled a successful appraisal well in a previously untested northern segment of the Mad Dog field in the Gulf of Mexico, leading it to double the size of the potential resource. The well, drilled by BHP Billiton on behalf of the unit operator BP, is in Green Canyon block 738, about 140 miles south of Grand Isle, LA., in about 4,500 feet of water. The well encountered about 166 net feet of hydrocarbons in the objective Miocene hydrocarbon-bearing sands and discovered an oil column of more than 300 feet. Combined with successful appraisals in Mad Dog...

Energy companies have started returning workers to offshore oil and gas production platforms in the wake of Tropical Storm Lee, but weather conditions continue to slow efforts. BP, the largest producer in the Gulf, said offshore conditions are improving steadily but high wind gusts are still limiting many helicopter flights out of Louisiana. Vessels leaving Port Fourchon, a key supply hub for the Gulf, are also continuing to experience rough seas, BP said in a statement. BP expects to begin returning crews to offshore facilities Tuesday morning. Shell, the No. 2 producer is continuing to redeploy personnel to its Western...

Oil companies are once again squaring off with government regulators in the Gulf of Mexico. This time, its Exxon Mobil. The giant oil company is fighting to retain leases for the Julia field, what could be the biggest oil discovery in the Gulf ever, or at least since BP’s Thunder Horse field in 1999. The problem: the government claims Exxon’s leases for the field have expired. The Obama administration has been cracking down on unused offshore leases, which cost the Treasury royalties, the Wall Street Journal reported. Exxon seems to believe getting an extension on the lease was just a...

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Another deep-water drilling rig is leaving the Gulf of Mexico amid a continued slowdown in activity in the U.S. offshore basin following the BP oil spill last year. Noble Corp. said its rig, called the Noble Paul Ramano, has taken a 180-day contract with Gujarat State Petroleum Corp. Ltd. to drill six wells offshore Egypt, with an option for four additional wells. The semi-submersible rig, which has been idle in the Gulf of Mexico since June 2010, is expected to start work in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea in October, the Zug, Switzerland-based drilling contractor said in a statement. Many deep-water...

The next presidential election is 15 months away, and 2012 (like most elections) will come down to the mundane, everyday, bread-and-butter issue of economics. I submit that the biggest economic indicator is the price of gasoline. Back in 2006, Nancy Pelosi railed about high gasoline prices, asserting that they were the result of “Big Oil” running the government. Barack Obama picked up on this theme during his 2008 presidential bid, and said he "felt the pain" of those who had to pay exorbitant gas prices.

Oil and gas production platforms continued to come back on line over the weekend as crews returned to offshore sites that had been evacuated as Tropical Storm Don came into the region late last week. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement reported about 6 percent of the Gulf of Mexico’s oil production (84,000 barrels) and 3.5 percent of the natural production (186 MM cubic feet per day) remained shut-in on Sunday. That’s an improvement over the peak storm-related outages of 11.9 percent of the oil production 6.2 percent of the natural gas production reported on Friday. Evacuating...

Oil and gas drilling in federal waters near Alaska could create tens of thousands of jobs annually and send the government nearly $200 billion in revenue, a Shell Oil Co. executive is set to tell a Senate panel today. Pete Slaiby, vice president of the company’s Alaska operations, is making his case for oil development near Alaska’s coasts before the Senate Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard Subcommittee this morning. The panel is studying whether the U.S. should be doing more to take advantage of emerging economic opportunities in the Arctic region. Shell is asking federal regulators for permission to...

Senator Jim Webb today called for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee to incorporate his Virginia Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Energy Production Act in pending offshore energy legislation this week. “Outer Continental Shelf production has strong support among Virginians and their political leadership,” Senator Webb wrote the Committee’s Chairman and Ranking Member. “I look forward to working with you to ensure that all of Virginia’s OCS energy resources are developed in a timely fashion, through a fair distribution of revenues between the federal and state government, and in an environmentally sound manner.” In his letter Senator Webb also urged the...

U.S. Sens. Jim Webb and Mark Warner introduced legislation Wednesday that would speed up the timetable for natural gas and oil exploration off Virginia's coast and expand the state's share of offshore territory. The bill also would require that half of future government revenues from offshore drilling be allocated directly to the state government or spent by federal officials on conservation efforts, transportation improvements and alternative energy projects in Virginia. The two Democrats' proposal goes further in seeking a larger share for Virginia from offshore resources than a House measure co-sponsored by two Hampton Roads congressmen. However, the plan will...

Latin America oil and gas activity is booming, with year-on-year rig activity increases from April 2010 to April 2011 in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, according to a recent report by London-based Evaluate Energy. The five countries have experienced at least a 15 percent increase in active rigs from the April 2010 count. In Brazil, the average number of rigs grew from 85 in April 2010 to 108 in April 2011, and in Venezuela, the average number of rigs grew from 88 in April 2010 to 110 in April 2011. However, Colombia has leapfrogged the pair within two years...

Diamond Offshore said that it will move another of its deepwater rigs from the U.S. Gulf of Mexico later this year to drill wells off Vietnam for BP. When the Ocean Monarch is moved, it will be the third Diamond rig to leave the Gulf of Mexico since BP's deadly Deepwater Horizon explosion in April and the subsequent shut-down of deep-water drilling in U.S. waters. Diamond said in a fleet status report that the Ocean Monarch should conclude its current contract with Marathon, for which the driller earned about $290,000 per day, in mid-August.

Exxon Mobil Corp. has made one of the largest oil and gas finds in the Gulf of Mexico in a decade, the company announced today. The oil major said it made two oil discoveries and a natural gas discovery in its Keathley Canyon blocks, including an oil discovery in the company’s first exploration well since last year’s moratorium on deep-water drilling. Exxon expects the combined finds to yield more than 700 million barrels of oil equivalent. More than 85 percent would be oil, the company said. Drilling early in 2010 turned up oil and natural gas at the well 250...

Bloomberg, link only, synopsis below

US Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) asked US Sec. of State Hillary R. Clinton to use diplomatic channels to temporarily keep an international consortium led by Repsol SA from drilling for oil off Cuba. Drilling possibly as early as this summer could threaten Florida tourism and is not in US interests, Nelson told her in a May 19 letter. The senator has fought possible development of Cuba’s offshore resources for years in several ways. He has asked Republican and Democratic administrations to withdraw diplomatic letters that the US government exchanges with Cuba every 2 years that enforce the 1977 Maritime Boundary...

U.S. citizens and permanent residents who invest offshore resemble Osama bin Laden more than they might wish to admit. Osama kept a very low profile at his estate in Pakistan. He had no telephone or Internet service. He even burned his trash, rather than set it out for collection. News reports claim (not that I believe them) that even Pakistani intelligence authorities knew nothing about his presence in their country. But in the end, the United States found him. Yesterday morning, a team of Navy Seals broke into his barricaded home, assassinated him (along with several other household occupants), and...

BP says it expects to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by the summer, less than 18 months after a rig it had leased there exploded, killing 11 workers and triggering a catastrophic oil spill. Company officials spoke as BP reported results that showed the repercussions of the Deepwater Horizon disaster continue to weigh on its balance sheet. Fergus MacLeod, BP's head of investor relations, told analysts that BP is working toward a "phased resumption of activities [in the Gulf] in the middle of the year," subject to regulatory approvals. He said BP would only restart if it could...

Shell Oil Company has announced it must scrap efforts to drill for oil this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska. The decision comes following a ruling by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board to withhold critical air permits. The move has angered some in Congress and triggered a flurry of legislation aimed at stripping the EPA of its oil drilling oversight. Shell has spent five years and nearly $4 billion dollars on plans to explore for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The leases alone cost $2.2 billion. Shell Vice President Pete Slaiby says obtaining...

One year after the BP PLC oil spill, Gulf of Mexico energy output is beginning to show the impact of the Obama administration's 10-month freeze on deep-water drilling. Offshore oil production, most of which comes from the Gulf, is expected to average 1.55 million barrels a day this year, down 13% from 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Following the April 20, 2010, blast on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig operated by BP and the subsequent oil spill, the Obama administration stopped awarding permits for deep-water drilling until late February. The drilling suspension, along with a new, slower...

year ago today, an explosion on Transocean's Deepwater Horizon ultra-deepwater semisubmersible, positioned at the Macondo Prospect in Mississippi Canyon Block 252, in the Gulf of Mexico, took the lives of 11 men and caused the largest marine oil spill in history. At 9:45 p.m. on April 20, 2010, while plugging the well for later production, seawater erupted from the marine riser onto the rig, shooting 240 ft into the air. A combination of mud, methane gas, and water quickly followed. The gas then ignited, causing explosions onboard. Attempts to activate the blowout preventer failed. Survivors said they had less than...

Harvey Cooper is now semi-retired, but not by choice. He blames that decision on Kenneth Feinberg, the government “spill czar” who’s in charge of claims related to the BP oil spill. Cooper owns American Medical Auditors in Katy, which specializes in analyzing medical claims for injured maritime workers. Most of his business came from the offshore energy industry in the Gulf of Mexico. When the government drilling moratorium was enacted last year, the impact on his company was immediate. “I saw no business coming,” he said. “All I do is handle claims for injured workers. If they aren’t working, they...

Mandates imposed after the Deepwater Horizon disaster have made offshore drilling safer, but the industry’s top U.S. regulator said the work isn’t over yet. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement is already crafting new proposals to “increase drilling safety and diminish the risks of a major blowout” by strengthening emergency equipment known as blowout preventers, among other changes, said director Michael Bromwich. “More change will surely come, although not at the frantic pace of the past year,” Bromwich said during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “We will be launching...

One year later, the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history looks more and more like just a big bump in the road in the drive to drill deeper in the Gulf of Mexico and potentially closer to Florida's coastline. The Deepwater Horizon disaster killed 11 rig workers, spewed 60,000 barrels of oil a day for four months, cost five states billions of dollars in lost jobs and business, slimed marshes, beaches and wildlife from the Louisiana bayou to the Florida Panhandle, and left lingering toxic stains across complex food webs that scientists say will take years to recover. A...

If BP’s Macondo well blowout happened today, oil companies say they would be far better prepared to respond than they were a year ago. One reason why they are so confident sits in an out-of-the-way fabrication yard in northwest Houston. The Marine Well Containment Co.’s $1 billion spill-containment system is now ready to go, with the ability to collect up to 60,000 barrels a day of oil from a leaking well in 8,000 feet of water. On Friday morning, the company allowed reporters for the first time to get an up-close look at the centerpiece of the system, a giant...

Drilling regulators from a dozen countries on Thursday agreed to take steps toward uniform standards for oil and gas exploration in oceans around the world. U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar suggested the idea ... Representatives from the European Union, the United States and 11 other countries, including the Russian Federation, Brazil and ... One notable absence in the planned collaboration and at Thursday's summit is Cuba, which expects five wells to be drilled off its coast in the next two years. Salazar said the United States was concerned about the potential drilling 60 miles off the coast of Florida, within...