Free Republic

First oil will flow south to refiners in the U.S. Gulf Coast this weekend on the Seaway pipeline, providing slight relief to bloated storage in the Midwest and to discounted Canadian crude. Enbridge Inc. and partner Enterprise Products Partners said Thursday the 150,000 barrel-per-day line reversal was complete, and oil from Cushing, Oklahoma would be arriving in Houston, Texas within two weeks. Markets responded to the news by shrinking the discount of West Texas Intermediate to Europe’s Brent by $2 to approximately $14 US per barrel on visions of slowly debottlenecking record amounts of oil at Cushing. The difference had...

Mitt Romney is vowing to approve TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline on his first day on the job if elected U.S. president in November. In a campaign ad unveiled on Friday, the presumptive Republican nominee asks voters to imagine Day 1 of his presidency, and lists Keystone as a top priority. "Day One, President Romney immediately approves the Keystone pipeline, creating thousands of jobs that Obama blocked," the ad's narrator says. Romney has been maligning U.S. President Barack Obama for months for failing to give the green light to Keystone. The president rejected the $7 billion pipeline earlier this year, but...

So it’s unanimous, then– Thomas Edsall was right: In the aftermath of Obama’s gay marriage flip, pundits seem to have concluded that Obama’s Democratic party has indeed given up on white working class voters. They’ve been dropped from the winning coalition, which is now composed of three main groups: “young people, college-educated whites (especially women), and minorities,” according to Ron Brownstein. Bill Galston agrees. Ruy Teixeira–who once wrote a book called America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters–agrees. Here’s Teixeira on how Obama can win Arizona: First, the share of Hispanic voters must grow and their support...

If we want to reduce fossil fuel consumption, I say, we should raise the price of gasoline to $7 a gallon. Reason: Today this country burns through 21 million barrels of oil per day, 60 percent of which is imported. Only with some shared economic pain will we ever change our habits. High gas prices will force us to think before we drive. It will encourage mass transit use, car pooling, and the sale of more fuel-efficient cars. The auto industry will not suffer because it has learned that it can charge more for cars that are cheaper to build...

This election is being fought along the traditional skirmish line of capital versus labor. President Obama projects himself as the protector of workers and families who are preyed upon by greedy and wealthy capitalists. Mitt Romney counters that the president doesn't understand business and that his antagonism discourages private investment and job creation. A couple of observations on the table. First, capital income doesn't flow just to "fat cats." It also goes to small businesses, retirement accounts, college endowments, ordinary shareholders, landlords and people who collect interest. Second, labor's shrinking share isn't necessarily a disaster for workers. What else is...

ALBANY — While the protesters who packed the stone stairwell of the state Capitol chanted "Ban Fracking Now," the political types in suits down the hall spoke of a different reality. Those protesters at Tuesday's anti-fracking rally in Albany carried signs saying "Governor Cuomo In 2014 We'll Remember" — a warning to Andrew Cuomo they won't vote for him if he doesn't ban the natural-gas extraction technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The buzz among the men and women outside the state Senate chamber said Cuomo's presumed political aspirations are the exact reason why there's so much pressure on him...

A proposed Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which has been signed by President Obama but not yet ratified by Congress, will subordinate U.S. naval and drilling operations beyond 200 miles of our coast to a newly established U.N. bureaucracy. If approved, it will grant a Kingston, Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority (ISA) the power to regulate deep-sea oil exploration, seabed mining, and fishing rights. As part of the deal, as much as 7% of U.S. government revenue that is collected from oil and gas companies operating off our coast will be forked over to ISA for redistribution to poorer, landlocked...

The U.S. oil boom has created a glut of crude in Cushing, Okla., a major oil storage hub. This sign dubs the city the "Pipeline Crossroads of the World." For years, Cushing, Okla., has been on the receiving end of a 500-mile pipeline funneling oil from the Gulf of Mexico to the American heartland.Starting this weekend, that pipeline will start moving crude in the other direction. That flow reversal could soon have implications at gas pumps around the country."For 40 years, crude oil flowed north," says Philip Verleger, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Today, oil...

With the planned Nabucco natural gas pipeline in southern Europe hitting snag after snag, Russian natural gas giant Gazprom is considering the construction of a second Baltic Sea pipeline to go with the just-finished Nord Stream. With unconventional natural gas from the US flooding the market, however, the strategy is not without risk. … Indeed, it is beginning to look as though the erstwhile competition between the two pipelines has been overwhelmingly won by Nord Stream. (Gerhardt) Schröder's team has just decided to expand the Baltic Sea pipeline's capacity. The owners, Gazprom, E.on-Ruhrgas, Wintershall, Gaz de France and the Dutch...

...In a statement, the campaign says Mr Romney would support using an executive order to waive "Obamacare" for all 50 states, and the pipeline would be "approved" by Mr Romney...

Residents and businesses in Michigan are wrestling with the highest electric rates in the region — and with the best way to fix that situation. As is often the case in Michigan, a more competitive market versus a monopoly market is central to the debate, as is mandating an increase in the amount of renewable energy the state uses. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Michigan's electric rates at the beginning of the year were 10 percent above the national average and had increased 8 percent over the previous year. With this reality as a backdrop, the state's energy...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview that Republicans have a “two out of three” chance of winning not only the White House in November, but the Senate and House as well. The reason, he says: President Obama “doesn’t have a clue about what he’s doing” and Americans can’t afford four more years of this “disaster.” Gingrich suspended his presidential campaign on May 2 and has endorsed Mitt Romney. The veteran Georgia lawmaker was first elected to the House in 1978 and served as speaker from 1995 to 1999 before announcing his retirement.

The Green River Formation, a largely vacant area of mostly federal land that covers the territory where Colorado, Utah and Wyoming come together, contains about as much recoverable oil as all the rest the world's proven reserves combined, an auditor from the Government Accountability Office told Congress on Thursday. The GAO testimony said that the federal government was in "a unique position to influence the development of oil shale" because the Green River deposits were mostly beneath federal land. It also noted that developing the oil would have an environmental impact and pose "socioeconomic challenges," that included bringing "a sizable...

In case you missed it – and you very well might have, since the media was too busy talking about gay marriage to be bothered – a rather remarkable thing happened in Washington this week. An auditor from the GAO testified before the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment on the subject of energy. But instead of hearing about how horrible things are, she calmly delivered something of a bombshell. “The Green River Formation–an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming–contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale,”Anu K....

The Obama campaign added a section on “clean coal” to its website this week after House Republicans alleged that the president’s “all-of-the-above” energy plan neglected the fossil fuel. “President Obama has set a 10-year goal to develop and deploy cost-effective clean coal technology,” the website now says. “The Recovery Act invested substantially in carbon capture and sequestration research, including 22 projects across four different areas of carbon capture-and-storage research and development.” As of Wednesday, the website did not include “clean coal” in a graphic outlining the president’s much-touted “all-of-the-above” energy plan. The graphic mentions oil, natural gas, biofuels, wind, solar...

Chairman Hastings: Documents Raise Serious Questions about Thoroughness and Independence of Inspector General’s Investigation into Drilling Moratorium Report Hastings sends letter to IG and releases documents received by Committee to date WASHINGTON, D.C., May 10, 2012 - House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (WA-04) today sent a letter to Department of the Interior’s Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall expressing deep concern with the thoroughness of the Office of Inspector General’s (IG) investigation into whether an Obama Administration report that recommended a six-month drilling moratorium was intentionally edited to incorrectly state the views of peer reviewers, and with the IG’s...

Abuse Of Power: An EPA official who apparently made good on a threat to "crucify" an oil company to make the entire energy industry "easy to manage" should resign or be fired. So why is the White House protecting him? EPA regional administrator for Dallas Al Armendariz told a city council meeting in a taped speech two years ago that his "philosophy" of enforcement was to single out an oil company, punish it "as hard as you can," and make an example of it to scare others into submission. "The Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean," said...

MANILA (AFP) - China told its citizens Thursday they were not safe in the Philippines and its state media warned of war, as a month-long row over rival claims in the South China Sea threatened to spill out of control. Chinese travel agencies announced they had suspended tours to the Philippines, under government orders, and the embassy in Manila advised its nationals already in the country to stay indoors ahead of planned protests. http://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/-/world/13654401/china-warns-citizens-as-row-with-philippines-escalates/

System skimps on poor, but Arab rulers dare not roll back political hot potato Agence France-Presse April 20, 2012 Arab countries are wasting tens of billions of dollars on subsidies for fuel and energy but dare not roll them back for fear of a political backlash, a UN report said. The UN Development Program (UNDP) report said six of the world's 10 biggest subsidizers are in the Arab world, led by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. People in the three countries pay less than a third of world prices for car fuel and electricity. The annual cost for Saudi Arabia...

Subject: Ever notice how the Arab oil interests control our economy? Author: Chris Kloss Date: 13 Jul 2009 IMHO, if the price of oil had remained low, the financial crisis would have been of short duration. Oil price affects just about everything in our economy, not just gasoline for cars. A rapid increase in the price of oil requires a reallocation of the money people and businesses spend. Businesses must raise prices and, one result of this might be a lower demand. Businesses need more money to replace inventory. Persons and businesses on the edge cannot meet their financial obligations....