Free Republic

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show. The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%. The revelation comes as the oil price has soared in recent weeks to more than $100 a barrel on global demand and tensions in the Middle East. Many analysts expect that the...

A historic oil field south of Houston, seemingly on its last leg after more than 80 years in service, is making a comeback. A North Texas company has launched a sweeping project to tap potentially huge oil reserves still left in the ground at the famed Hastings field, located between Alvin and Pearland. The project aims to free stranded oil by injecting carbon dioxide into the once-prolific reservoir in a process used since the 1970s in West Texas to coax more crude from aging fields. It is made possible by a new $1 billion pipeline that carries the gas from...

Reporting from Sacramento — — As crude oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, many California Democrats are hoping to seize on the public mood created by the crisis to push through a new tax on oil production to help balance the state's beleaguered budget. A proposed levy on oil production is at the core of both Democratic budget plans circulating in Sacramento, and thus will be on the table in upcoming budget talks with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. And though the Republican governor has emphatically said he is opposed to new taxes this year, he has supported the...

Carbon dioxide pouring from smokestacks hardly has a reputation as a valuable commodity. But one company has launched a series of projects to see if it can use the refuse of the industrial economy to breathe new life into tired oil fields. How well Denbury Resources Inc.'s projects go will be closely watched not just by environmentalists but other oil producers. For decades, companies have pumped naturally-occurring carbon dioxide from geological basins into existing oil wells. The gas acts like a solvent for the oil, removing it from rock formations.

The Gang of 10 has all but surrendered. For now, there are no major initiatives to raise taxes on energy production.

HUGE Oil Field in Montana is Good News for Consumers --Which Makes it Unpalatable for the Mainstream MediaWhile Jeroen van der Veer, Shell’s chief executive, fears for the future of oil supplies after 2015--maybe he's confusing Shell's oil supply with the rest of the world's--Newsmax has just released information on the HUGE oil discovery in Montana: the Williston Basin or "Bakken" field. About 470 miles outside the state capitol of Helena - in a place called Richland County, Montana - more millionaires are being created per capita than anywhere else in America. It's the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska's...

CARACAS, Venezuela — For the better part of a decade, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has spent billions of dollars of his country's oil revenue to challenge U.S. interests, build influence around the world and fund a self-styled socialist revolution at home. Yet as Chavez moves from one international crisis to another— most recently a near military confrontation with neighboring Colombia , an important U.S. ally— many wonder how long his oil-funded wild ride will last. Not long, analysts in Venezuela and abroad said, if production continues to decline at the country's state-run energy company, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. , known...

Iran's oil minister admitted yesterday that Tehran was having trouble financing oil projects, in a rare acknowledgment of the cost of its nuclear dispute. "Currently, overseas banks and financiers have decreased their co-operation," Kazem Vaziri-Hamaneh told Shana, the oil ministry news agency. The statement underlined the impact of de facto financial sanctions on the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries' second biggest oil producer. As the controversy over Iran's nuclear programme has escalated, the US has applied pressure on European banks and financial institutions to curb dealings with Tehran. The fact that the UN Security Council could soon impose the...

(06-30) 04:00 PDT Cardenas, Mexico -- Gonzalo Rodriguez has an unenviable task as the boss of a major oil field -- ripping out a large part of the pumping and compressing machinery that collects the output from scores of wells. "Unfortunately, we don't need this capacity anymore," he said. "This isn't like the old days, and they aren't coming back." Like much of Mexico's giant oil production apparatus, this area, known as the Bellota oil field, is in an apparently unstoppable decline. At current extraction rates, the nation has only 10 years of proven oil reserves remaining. And as Mexico...

IRAQ'S oil production is now over 2.5 million barrels a day, a record since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the country's oil minister said overnight. Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani said on US television that Iraq hopes to be producing 4.3 million barrels by 2010 and to be challenging Saudi Arabia as the world's largest producer by 2015. Production was about 2.5 million barrels a day when president Saddam Hussein was deposed by US-led forces in 2003. It then collapsed to virtually nothing and has been slow to rebuild because of insurgent attacks and other problems. In an interview with CNN...

Predicting the end of oil era has been a venerable (albeit fruitless) pseudo-intellectual pursuit for most of the 20th century. This Nostradamian pastime regained new vigor during the late 1990s when (mostly retired geologists) Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, L.F. Ivanhoe, Richard Duncan and Kenneth Deffeyes -- and their groupies gathered under the WWW umbrellas of peakoil.net, peakoil.com, peakoil.org and hubbertpeak.com --- flooded the media with catastrophist tales of imminent peak of the global oil production to be followed by a precipitous decline of oil availability resulting in the demise of modern civilization. As self-appointed prophets are want to do, these...

From RIGZONE - your gateway to the oil and gas industry: Special Report: Hurricane Katrina Damage Assessment It has been a week since Hurricane Katrina pounded its way across Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, on its way to causing one of the worst natural disasters in American history. The course it took through the Gulf led straight through the heart of the offshore oil patch into America's most active port and leading oil refining region. The damage to the oil and gas industry is still being assessed, but by all accounts it could have been much worse. However, the...

ABU DHABI (Reuters) - Major Gulf producer Kuwait will back a hike of 1 million barrels per day in OPEC's output ceiling if oil prices stay at record levels, a move that would bring formal production limits in line with actual supplies. OPEC ministers also pledged on Sunday to do what they can to deflate oil prices at record high levels beyond $53. Top crude exporter Saudi Arabia said it could immediately tap 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) of its spare capacity if needed. "If prices continue as they are now, we will ask for an increase in the...

OPEC Oil Output Cut Proves Group's Capacity To Surprise . By Andrew Dowell Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES VIENNA (Dow Jones)--OPEC proved its capacity to surprise Wednesday with a plan to cut its output quotas by 3.5% after ministers had led the market to expect no change. Oil futures soared on the news, climbing as much as 4% in New York. The cut, which reverses a quota increase agreed to in April, is needed to make room for rising output from Iraq, Kuwaiti Oil Minister Sheikh Ahmad Fahad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah said. Iraq's oil production has nearly doubled from the August level...

OPEC meets in Japan on Thursday amid a looming conflict between the United States and Iraq to debate whether there is a need to increase production as prices approach $30 a barrel. But underlying the discussions are more fundamental issues that will define OPEC's role in world oil markets and its ability to influence them. Within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, divisions run along economic lines, with the less wealthy nations such as Nigeria and Venezuela parting company with the more prosperous Arab nations, such as Saudi Arabia. Outside of the cartel, OPEC faces pressures to set prices...