Everybody is asking that question these days. The average nationwide price for all grades this week is $3.96/gallon; Californians are paying on average $4.26, the highest in the nation. Why does it cost so much, especially considering that the price was below $2.00/gallon just within the last couple of years? Nearly seventy percent of the price of a gallon of retail gasoline is the price | Read More »
From Vladimir’s diary, dated December 18, 2009: Remember $4.00 per Gallon Gasoline? Just Wait. Well, here we are, less than 18 months later. A little context: Gasoline prices (national average, all grades) peaked over $4.00 per gallon for a couple of months in the summer of 2008. Prices bottomed in December 2008 at $1.66. By December 2009, at the time of the writing of the | Read More »
A ruling by the Environmental Appeals Board of the EPA has scuttled Shell Oil Company’s plan to drill its initial exploratory test in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea. This is at least the second time drilling has been deferred or delayed due to environmental concerns. But this time, the reason proffered by EPA seems to be “Because we can.” The EPA’s appeals board ruled that Shell had | Read More »
As the graph below shows, the price of gas is languishing just above $4.00 per thousand cubic feet. I’m selling gas at 2/3 the price it was back in 2005, and about a third of its peak price in 2008! Somebody must be cheating me out of my gas, and it’s about time Obama looked into it! Huh? What’s that? You don’t think that’s the | Read More »
On April 20, 2010, an explosion and fire on the Transocean drilling rig Deepwater Horizon caused the deaths of 11 rig workers. The subsequent blowout flowed uncontrolled to the Gulf of Mexico, ultimately spilling an estimated 5 million barrels of crude oil over the next 100 days. The regulatory aftermath continues to this day. “Vladimir” wrote dozens of diaries at RedState on the engineering, environmental, | Read More »
A picture is worth 1,000 words. Or 95 quadrillion BTUs, which is how much energy from all sources the U.S. consumed in 2009. A well-constructed graph can convey so much information. I posted a link to this image on RedHot the other night, but thought it was worth bringing out a few observations. Since energy flow is represented by the width of the various lines, | Read More »
A March 17 press release from BOEMRE announced the approval of Petrobras’s permit application for the Gulf of Mexico’s first FPSO (“Floating Production Storage Offloading” facility), offshore Louisiana. I have no problem with FPSOs per se. The technology has been used around the world, in places like Brazil, Angola, the North Sea and off Australia. But this would be the first FPSO in U.S. | Read More »
Oil and natural gas are our primary transportation fuels, supplying 97% of the energy (27 quadrillion BTUs!) that we use annually to move our cars, trucks, buses, boats, planes and trains. The 3% that comes from renewables is ethanol. (Source.) Beware the man who tells you he’s ever going to reduce our oil imports by growing wind and solar energy. Wind and solar are used | Read More »
In his Wednesday address at Georgetown University, President Obama took another stab at elucidating his muddled energy policy: It was just three years ago that gas prices topped $4 a gallon. I remember because I was in the middle of a presidential campaign. Working folks certainly remember because it hit a lot of people pretty hard. And because we were at the height of political | Read More »
In an effort to deflect blame for high gasoline prices away from the Obama Administration, the Department of the Interior today released a report which purports to show that the oil and gas industry, not DOI or BOEMRE, is guilty of dragging its feet on offshore energy exploration and development. This, in spite of a 10 month regulatory moratorium/permitorium that has brought new well drilling | Read More »
In 2011, Gulf of Mexico oil production will under-perform the government’s pre-Macondo forecasts by 355,000 barrels per day — almost 130 million barrels for the year. In 2012, the shortfall rises to 550,000 barrels per day — 200 million barrels. That’s fully one-third of the Gulf’s oil producing capability, and over 10% of total domestic oil production. These are staggering numbers. Alaska, our #1 oil | Read More »
This entertaining and informative video was put together by the Offshore Marine Services Association, an industry association which represents, not oil companies or drilling contractors, but the owners of the supply vessels which service them.
The White House Blog, in a post entitled “Expanding Safe and Responsible Energy Production”, lays out the case for the Obama Administration as a long-time supporter of domestic oil and gas: One area where we have focused our efforts since the start of the administration – long before this current spike – is increasing responsible domestic energy production – including oil and gas. In fact, | Read More »
When it comes to cutting budgets, everything is on the table with the Democratic leadership of the Senate. Absolutely everything, everything, up to and including cowboy poetry festivals. Or maybe not. “The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1, eliminates National Public Broadcasting,” said Reid in a floor speech. “It eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts. These programs create jobs. The National | Read More »
On Wednesday, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour spoke to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on energy policy: Barbour says Obama cheers for higher gas price “This administration’s policies have been designed to drive up the cost of energy in the name of reducing pollution, in the name of making very expensive alternative fuels more economically competitive,” Barbour said… Barbour cited a statement by Nobel laureate Steven | Read More »
Could ethanol-driven food price increases be at the root of recent unrest in Egypt and the greater Middle East? An article by Robert Bryce in the Energy Tribune explores the connection between the Iowa Presidential Caucuses, ethanol subsidies, and the rising tide of discontent: Biofuels Driving Up Food Prices As Iowa Primary Approaches This year, the US corn ethanol sector will consume 40 percent of | Read More »
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (COMINTERN) (AMPAS) are a bunch of suckers when it comes to Leftist propaganda films featuring outrageous, junk-science based, anti-capitalist claptrap. Just ask Al Gore, who won an Oscar a few years back for An Inconvenient Truth. One of this year’s nominees in the Documentary Feature category is a film by Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic called Gasland. | Read More »
As “Vladimir”, I’ve written at length about the destructive energy policies of the Left and of the Obama Administration. Specifically, their hostility toward domestic producers and the producing states will inevitably lead to higher unemployment and a stagnant economy in the near term; long term, they imperil our national security. What could possibly motivate them? Some say that Obama is merely the puppet of an | Read More »
Sounds like the U.S. Government needs to hire some competent lawyers. Lucrative Gulf of Mexico drilling loophole survives challenge in U.S. House On a mostly party-line vote, The House Friday night rejected a Democratic amendment that would have corrected a 1995 mistake in drilling rules [sic] that allowed oil and gas companies to drill in portions of the Gulf of Mexico without paying royalties. The | Read More »
Judge Tells Government to Resume Permits for Drilling WASHINGTON — A federal judge in New Orleans on Thursday ordered the Obama administration to move quickly on permits for new deepwater oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, saying that the government could no longer justify long delays in allowing new projects to go forward. … “Not acting at all is not a lawful option,” Judge | Read More »
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