10 Ways Obama Could Reduce Gasoline Prices Now

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  February 25th at 02:00 PM  | 

Tulsa World headline: Obama: No magic bullet to lower gas prices WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says there is no easy answer to the problem of rising energy prices, dismissing Republican plans to address the problem as little more than gimmicks. “We know there’s no silver bullet that will bring down gas prices or reduce our dependence on foreign oil overnight,” Obama said Saturday in | Read More »

$2.50 per Gallon Gasoline, Energy Independence and Jobs

By: Newt Gingrich (Diary)  |  February 23rd at 07:48 AM  | 

To hear the White House and President Obama tell it, high gasoline prices are here to stay and we better get used to them. If Americans would quiet down and accept $4.00 a gallon gas, it would certainly make the President and his environmentalist allies happy—but it would also require us to forget everything we know about American energy. During the years I was speaker | Read More »

Senator Jerry Moran Wants to Pick Losers in the Market: His Choice is Big Wind

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  February 21st at 02:15 PM  | 

If I were pressed to offer one anecdote exemplifying our failure to elect consistent conservatives to Congress last November, the story of Senator Jerry Moran and Big Wind would be at the top of the list. In 2010, then-Congressman Jerry Moran beat former Congressman Todd Tiahrt for the Republican nomination for Senate in Kansas running as a red meat conservative.  He easily won the seat | Read More »

Introducing the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  February 7th at 05:00 PM  | 

Around these parts, we have a word that aptly describes shale formations: ubitquitious. (sic) Every conventional oil and gas basin must have a hydrocarbon source, and that source is a shale. And since shales are low in permeability, we’re finding that the source rock still contains plenty of hydrocarbons, if you can figure out how to get the stuff out. One of the newly-emerging plays | Read More »

Governors Branstad and Brownback Spew Hot Air for Big Wind

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  February 3rd at 06:50 AM  | 

After billions in stimulus funding failed to transform impotent green energy sources into profitable endeavors, even Obama has taken a break from promoting Wind and Solar.  He is even talking more about oil and gas exploration, although his sincerity is in serious doubt.  Unfortunately, some Republicans have not relinquished their affinity for using public funds to prop up their local wind industry. Yesterday, Iowa Gov. | Read More »

Congressional Republicans Can and Must Force Obama’s Hand on Keystone Pipeline

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  January 23rd at 04:00 PM  | 

Immediately prior to the congressional recess in December, Congress passed an inefficacious two-month extension of the Social Security tax cut.  Additionally, they reauthorized another two months of unprecedented long-term unemployment benefits, along with more spending for Medicare ‘doc fix.’  None of it, including the entitlement spending, was paid for in any meaningful way. Nevertheless, you might ask, didn’t we get the Keystone pipeline as part | Read More »

Six House Dems Would Confiscate ‘Excessive’ Oil Profits

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  January 22nd at 08:35 AM  | 

Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D’OH), have filed a bill aimed at controlling gasoline prices. Styled the “Gas Price Spike Act”, H.R. 3784 would establish a “Reasonable Profits Board” which would have the power to confiscate 100% of oil company profits above a level that they deem to be “reasonable”. I know: “You had me at ‘Kucinich’.” Kucinich is either a naive | Read More »

More Mush from the Times

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  January 7th at 02:00 PM  | 

In a New York Times editorial celebrating the recent demise of the ethanol subsidy, the Old Grey Lady once again descends into outright falsehood to malign the industry that Progressives love to hate: Congress should now focus on the oil industry, which has long enjoyed a web of arcane and unnecessary tax breaks — deductions for well depletion and intangible drilling costs. They are unique | Read More »

Gas Pains

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  January 7th at 08:00 AM  | 

1. Despite a natural gas drilling moratorium in New York, that state’s Chemung and Broome Counties are feeling the economic lift from drilling next door in Pennsylvania. But to the New York Times, the ex-pat workers, largely from Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, have awfully low-brow tastes, don’t you know. (NYT link below the fold.) 2a & 2b. The Daily Beast seems to have turned over | Read More »

Gas Reaches Record High as Gas Hits Record Low

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  January 4th at 06:00 PM  | 

On an annual basis, retail gasoline prices hit an all-time high in 2011. The average price for all grades was $3.576 per gallon, vs $3.299 in 2008. Meanwhile, the shale gas revolution has set the stage for declining prices per mmbtu of natural gas.

Quash the Ethanol Beast in Honor of Iowa Caucuses

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  January 2nd at 06:00 PM  | 

As the clock struck 12 am January 1, one of the most anti free market government interventions expired without renewal and without fanfare.  In honor of the Iowa Caucuses, we can now declare that the ethanol subsidies and tariffs are finally dead.  However, before we celebrate this rare piece of good news, we must remember that in order to deracinate the ethanol beast from our | Read More »

Offshore O&G Lease Sale: Small Companies Stay Away in Droves

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  December 18th at 05:33 PM  | 

On Wednesday of the week just past, the Department of the Interior conducted the first sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico since BP’s Macondo oil spill. Measured by the statistics touted in Interior’s press release, the sale would appear to be a rousing success: NEW ORLEANS – The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced that its | Read More »

The New York Times and Its Anti-Fracking Cargo Cult

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  December 13th at 07:00 PM  | 

Another day, another distorted and fear-mongering attack from the Old Grey Lady on America’s natural gas industry. Headline: Add Quakes to Rumblings Over Gas Rush (originally published under the headline “Some Blame Hydraulic Fracturing For Earthquake Epidemic”; link may require subscription/signup) Nine quakes in eight months in a seismically inactive area is unusual. But Ohio seismologists found another surprise when they plotted the quakes’ epicenters: | Read More »

North America’s Energy Bounty, By the Numbers

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  December 9th at 04:00 PM  | 

On Tuesday, the Institute for Energy Research issued its North American Energy Inventory (.pdf link), a report which documents the government’s own estimates of oil, natural gas and coal resources for the U.S., Canada and Mexico. (The IER is a non-profit, non-partisan 501(c)3 organization that is dedicated to advancing America’s supply using free market principles.) In a nutshell, North America contains a vast bounty of | Read More »

The GOP Payroll Tax Cut/UI Extension Proposal

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  December 9th at 12:04 PM  | 

“will they finally hold the line on their own promises this time, or will they pass all the extensions without the reforms, riders, and spending offsets? This package must be the final offer.” Earlier today, House Republican leaders unveiled their package deal to extend the payroll tax and unemployment benefits for another year and to continue Medicare ‘doc fix’ for another two years. While bipartisan | Read More »