Two Words for Michele Bachmann and the $2 per Gallon Gasoline Pledge
Natural Gas.
Energy
Drilling Rigs in Pennsylvania! Hide the Womenfolk!
Democratic State Rep. Michael Sturla is apparently not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Speaking of the impact of the Marcellus Shale drilling boom on Pennsylvania, Sturla said: “Also, aside from building roads so their trucks can get to drill sites and doing a little stream work to mitigate damage from their road building, exactly what are all those things the drillers are doing for | Read More »
Keystone XL Pipeline: Bureaucratic Hacky-Sack
The Obama Administration continues to play bureaucratic hacky-sack with what could be a key element of our nation’s secure energy future: the Keystone XL pipeline project. The new line would increase the export capacity of the Keystone Pipeline (placed in service 2008) by 700,000 barrels of Canadian oil-sands oil per day. The expansion would also facilitate the domestic movement of crude from the key storage | Read More »
Congressional Democrats Aim to Kill Energy’s Golden Goose
If “it’s all about the jobs”, why are Democrats trying to kill one of the only successful job creation engines in our economy? From Texas and Louisiana to North Dakota and Pennsylvania, energy development is creating good jobs, well-paying jobs, by the tens and even hundreds of thousands. Billions of dollars are flowing into the economies of the host states. The common thread of the | Read More »
WSJ Misses the Mark on Oil Markets and the SPR
An article by Sarah Kent in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “Traders Eye Oil Tanker Play”, (full text requires subscription*) purports to explain current action in the oil market, as 30 million barrels of crude oil are due to be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) before August 31. … While they fall short of the lefty paranoia of ThinkProgress.org and its crack “investigative journalist”, | Read More »
BOEMRE Slowdown Costs 230,000 Jobs, $44 Billion in GDP
A new study from IHS-CERA, one of the leading energy think tanks, projects the cost of the Department of the Interior’s ongoing regulatory slowdown and its impact on the energy industry, employment in the coastal states, and the U.S. economy in general. The study, released on Thursday, was commissioned by the Gulf Economic Survival Team (GEST). We’re beginning to see the true cost of an | Read More »
Dr. Steven Chu and ‘Common Sense’
Energy Secretary and Nobel Laureate Dr. Steven Chu defends the banning of conventional incandescent light bulbs as a ‘common-sense’ measure that is certainly a ‘win-win’ for consumers. (Caution: Clicking HuffPo links may cause a loss of IQ points.) Overall, consumers will save $6 billion a year from these standards. Here’s another example of how common-sense standards like these have been working for American families for | Read More »
Lee Fang on Oil Speculation: In Over His Head
Summertime 2011, and “investigative journalist” Lee Fang of ThinkProgress has replaced the BP Spill in my blogging life. Fang’s amateurish attempts to find scandal in oil commodities trading have become my new blog fodder. Fang puts forward the half-baked theory that the evil Koch Brothers and other traders control world oil prices via speculation. His latest piece, “JP Morgan, Koch, Other Oil Traders May Buy | Read More »
Why Did Obama Open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?
On Thursday, the Department of Energy announced a release of thirty million barrels of crude oil over the next 60 days from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the nation’s stockpile supposedly set aside for emergency supply disruptions. Washington, DC – U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced today that the U.S. and its partners in the International Energy Agency have decided to release a total of 60 | Read More »
The Big Energy Lie, Revisited
Your President has been telling you things that simply aren’t true. Things like “We can’t drill our way out of our energy problems.” Or “Oil and gas are the fuels of the past.” Or, perhaps worst of all, “The U.S. consumes 25% of the world’s oil, but controls only 2% of the world’s reserves.” Well, that last one may be technically true, but it is | Read More »
How Much Will It Cost to Repeal the ‘Oil Subsidies’?
This week, the Senate is set to consider the repeal of certain provisions of the tax code as they relate to the oil and gas industry. By styling these tax breaks as “subsidies”, the Administration and other opponents of the industry wrongly equate them with the benefits enjoyed by ethanol, wind and solar energy. But the tax credits for alternative energy production are true subsidies, | Read More »
Wasserman Schultz: ‘We’ve really concentrated’ on oil production
There was an undeniable uptick in U.S. oil production in 2009 and 2010. But new DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) tried to take credit for it: Like I said, domestic oil production is at its highest point in recent years. So we’ve actually really concentrated on that. Democrats patting themselves on the back for oil production increases? Ba. Lo. Ney. With all due | Read More »
‘Why does my gas cost $4.00 per gallon?’
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 »
Blast from the Past: ‘Remember $4.00 Gas? Just Wait.’ (Dec ’09)
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 »
Obama Appoints ‘Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group’. It’s About Time!
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 »
BP’s Macondo Disaster, One Year Later
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 »
Energy Flow: Sources and Uses
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 »
Obama to Reduce Gas Prices by Blowing Smoke
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 »
Obama’s Energy Ideas: Running on Empty
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 »
Obama/Salazar Moratorium Has Crippled Domestic Oil Production
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 »
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