Free Republic

Among many claimed benefits, cryptocurrencies supposedly offer two significant benefits over fiat currencies: 1) autonomy and 2) discretion. This past week, the U.S. federal government took them both down. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a press statement that it had seized $2.3 million in cryptocurrency. The seizure was the result of the FBI's Colonial Pipeline investigation. As a reminder, Colonial Pipeline, the U.S.'s largest pipeline for refined oil products, was the victim of a cyberattack. Against the U.S.'s wishes and policies, Colonial Pipeline paid millions in ransom to retake control of the pipeline. According to the FBI, they had...

Jon Husted says shutting down Line 5 oil pipeline will increase gas prices Republican Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted is calling out Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for her efforts to shut down a major oil pipeline that carries Canadian oil across the Midwest.

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. (AP) — A massive cargo ship made a series of unusual movements while anchored in the closest spot to a Southern California oil pipeline that ruptured and sent crude washing up on beaches, according to data collected by a marine navigation service... ...The Associated Press reviewed more than two weeks of data from MarineTraffic, a navigation service that tracks radio signals from transponders that broadcast the locations of ships and large boats every few minutes. That data shows the Rotterdam Express, a German-flagged ship nearly 1,000 feet (305 meters) long, was assigned to anchorage SF-3, the closest...

Speaking to reporters at the White House Tuesday afternoon, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm admitted that pipelines are the safest way to transport fuel. Her comments come as 17 states face a major gas shortage due to a cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline system and four months after President Joe Biden stopped construction on the Keystone XL pipeline. "Can you tell us what is the feasibility of using rail cars to transport fuel into the affected areas? I know that's being looked at," a reporter asked. "The DOT [Department of Transportation] is looking at that, and so we'll have to wait...

The number of casualties after an oil product pipeline explosion in Nigeria has reached 200, local media report, as people from local communities have gathered to protest the negligence of the Nigerian national Petroleum Corporation, which, they said, was the reason for the explosion. The pipeline exploded after it caught fire near the Aba Depot last week. NNPC at the time blamed the explosion on oil theft, which is still rampant in the Niger Delta despite many attempts by the government to put an end to the dangerous practice. The cause of the fire, the company said, could have been...

The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books («Whose Sarin?» and «The Red Line and the Rat Line») has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles. Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to set...

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio—With the help of celebrities and professional activists, protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota attracted international attention. The shouting and violence have drawn sympathy from people who are hearing only one side of the story — the one told by activists. Were the full story to be heard, much, if not all, of that sympathy would vanish.

The U.S. government says it will help Kenya get the financing it needs to build an $18 billion pipeline from the oil fields in the country's northwest to its southeastern Indian Ocean coast to help it become a net exporter of oil. The pipeline would stretch nearly 500 miles from Lokichar in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley to the coastal town of Lamu, and would be an almost impossibly expensive project for the East African nation. Yet there is enough oil there to make the plan worthwhile. The pan-African financial institution Ecobank Transnational Inc. says it has proven reserves of about...

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, has a new project. ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand. The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million...

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — A potentially endangered species of bat could become a major obstacle to the proposed Sandpiper oil pipeline in northern Minnesota. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering whether to declare the northern long-eared bat an endangered species because the spread of the white-nosed syndrome disease has reduced its population. In that case, Enbridge could be forced to postpone its pipeline project or chose a different route. The current proposal would carry crude from the North Dakota oilfields to Superior, Wisconsin and would run through the bats' habitat. Enbridge has already taken steps to avoid...

After the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, it didnt take long for environmentalists to cry gloom and doom and for the media to hype those claims. From caribou dying to earthquakes to all hell breaking loose, there was no shortage of catastrophic predictions though the Alaska pipeline now boasts great success roughly 30 years later.      Construction on the pipeline began in 1975, and oil first moved through it on June 20, 1977. Former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton summed up its success in 2003 that Today the pipeline produces 17 percent of our domestic petroleum. It...

CUSHING, Okla.— New pipeline projects are expanding the size of an Oklahoma crude oil hub that is already one of the most important oil storage facilities in the world. One new pipeline is in operation at the hub in Cushing, another is almost complete and a new project was announced earlier this month when Tulsa-based NGL Energy Partners revealed plans for the Grand Mesa Pipeline, a joint venture with Rimrock Midstream LLC, the Tulsa World reported Saturday. Grand Mesa, which will be open to oil producer commitments starting next week, will be a 550-mile system from Colorado to Cushing. Once...

An apparent result of Obama’s hold on the Keystone XL pipeline, which has forced oil to be transported from Canada by rail: A mile-long train hauling oil from Canada derailed, spilling 30,000 gallons of crude in western Minnesota on Wednesday, as debate rages over the environmental risks of transporting tar sands across the border. … There has been a rapid increase in rail transport of crude in the last three years as booming North American oil production has outgrown existing pipeline capacity.

(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration’s new ambassador to Azerbaijan raised eyebrows this week with a gesture interpreted by some as paying homage to the country’s late dictator – a one-time KGB general installed by military coup who oversaw an autocratic regime before handing power to his son. “The new U.S. envoy to Azerbaijan, Richard Morningstar, has honored memory of national leader of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev,” the Azeri news site News.Az reported. “The newly appointed ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the United States in Azerbaijan visited the monument to great leader in the park in front of the Heydar Aliyev’s Palace....

'clandestine tap' Despite 130-ton pot busts and their being locked in a five year, multilateral war with the government/other gangs in which 5x more people have died than US losses for the entire Iraq war, frightening Mexican drug mafias continue to grow in wealth, power, and influence... and are now extending their unique brand of chaos directly to US soil.The Mexican federal government already had enough problems facing an utterly ruthless enemy equipped with machine guns, narco-tanks and homemade submarines attained via almost unlimited cash- now the gangs have gone on the offensive against the feds' own primary revenue source, Pemex: over thirty of the...

A pipeline that is set to begin transporting crude oil from the Midwest to refiners on the Gulf Coast later this year is already fully booked through its initial phase, a company spokesman said, the latest sign of the intense interest in moving crude trapped in the central U.S. The Seaway pipeline is set to begin transporting 150,000 barrels a day of crude from Cushing, Okla., to the Gulf Coast starting June 1, expanding to 400,000 barrels a day starting in the first quarter of 2013. Currently, the pipeline moves crude in the opposite direction toward Cushing. The pipeline is...

Carney: GOP cancelled Keystone, not Obama By Neil Munro - The Daily Caller 1:49 PM 02/21/2012 WASHINGTON – The president didn’t stop the Keystone XL oil pipeline — Republicans did. That’s the message on Tuesday from White House spokesman Jay Carney as gas prices rise above $4.00 per gallon. “The president didn’t turn down the Keystone pipeline,” Carney said, because the proposal to construct the pipeline was reviewed by the Department of State. President Barack Obama’s decisions to nix construction of the pipeline has been repeatedly attacked by the GOP, and by some Democratic-allied unions representing construction workers. They say...

WASHINGTON — On Dec. 31, just hours before a New Year's Eve celebration, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. Section 1245 of the law contains language providing authority to impose economic sanctions on Iran in order to deter the ayatollahs from acquiring nuclear weapons. White House efforts to have the sanctions provision stripped from the bill failed, and the measure became law with a quiet flourish of the presidential pen. Ever since, Washington and Tehran have been waging a war of words. None of this works to the advantage of the American...

The political and environmental debates swirling around the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas miss a crucial point, energy analysts say: The Canadian oil is needed to replace fast-dwindling production from two other major suppliers of oil Mexico and Venezuela. The United States remains the largest consumer of oil in the world, requiring more than 8 million barrels a day of fuel imports to feed its appetite, with nearly half of that coming from oil-rich neighbors in Latin America as recently as 2005. But oil production south of the border has fallen off dramatically, and Canadian...

GREAT FALLS, Mont. – Public hearings in Montana are being held this week to discuss a plan to build a pipeline through eastern Montana to move crude extracted from Canada's oil sands to refineries in the United States. Calgary-based TransCanada Corp. aims to start construction this year on the 1,980-mile Keystone XL pipeline. The first of six meetings is planned for Monday in Malta. Additional meetings are set in Glasgow, Terry, Circle and Glendive. The final meeting is Thursday in Baker.