January | 2011 | The Price of Oil

Posts in January 2011

“Compromised” API Set for Key Safety Role
Andy Rowell
Jan31
So its back to business as usual. Bob Dudley, BP’s chief executive, is set to announce a resumption of dividend payments tomorrow as a signal to investors that the oil giant is back on track, after last year’s Deepwater disaster. The reinstatement is key for Dudley to show investor confidence before his inaugural presentation to…
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Was Ugandan Oil Deal “Corrupt”?
Andy Rowell
Jan28
Tullow Oil is “approaching the finishing line” in talks with the Ugandan government to resolve a tax dispute that has held up plans to bring in new partners to exploit its oil reserves there. Tullow expects to reach an agreement to sell a share of its Uganda assets to Total SA and China National Offshore…
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“Shell, Let’s Go Clean Nigeria!”
Andy Rowell
Jan27
Just before dawn yesterday, activists from Friends of the Earth in the Netherlands scaled the front of Shell’s headquarters in the Hague and urged the company to “clean up” its operations in Nigeria. Some activists were dressed as oil-smeared birds. Others held pictures of polluted land or hung plastic strips appearing to smear Shell’s corporate…
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What oil subsidies is Obama targeting?
Steve Kretzmann
Jan26
Last night, The President once again proposed ending subsidies to the oil industry. As we’ve said before, this is a great idea, and should be supported in full. That said, although we haven’t seen details, it’s quite unlikely that the Administration is proposing to eliminate all these subsidies. First, there is an important difference from…
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“Clean” Obama Versus Newt King Coal?
Andy Rowell
Jan26
So we have been here before. A year ago Obama called for the ending of fossil fuel subsidies in his state of the Union address. Since then we have had two significant events: the Gulf oil spill, that you would have thought would have made it easier for politicians to stop subsidising oil companies. Then…
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The “world’s worst oil-related disaster”
Andy Rowell
Jan25
In many ways it has been a lengthy legal fight like no other. On the one side are tens of thousands of poor Ecuadorian Indians and on the other the raw might of American Big Oil, in the shape of Texaco and then Chevron. In the middle is a chronically polluted Amazon and the lega…
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The Oil Boom is Back
Andy Rowell
Jan24
A new report by the energy consultancy, PFC Energy, is arguing that the center of the global energy industry is slowly shifting away from the oil majors. Publicly traded companies in Russia, China and Brazil are taking more of the top spots in its influential global ranking of the world’s energy giants. In part to…
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A €30 Million Joke
Andy Rowell
Jan21
For a long time the concept of carbon trading has had its critics. The primary one is that trading carbon does not really get rid of the problem: the emissions of carbon dioxide. It merely changes pollution into a commodity that can be traded. As the NGO Carbontrade Watch argues: “Carbon offsets allow companies and…
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CO2 emissions to rise by 25% in 20 years, says Big Oil
Andy Rowell
Jan20
We are on the path to climate chaos, Big Oil has admitted. Both BP and Exxon have conceded that progress on climate change is totally insufficient to stabilize CO2 emissions. Both oil companies have just published their Energy Outlooks, and the outlook looks grim. In a bleak prognosis for success on reducing carbon dioxide emissions,…
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Opponents to Fracking Disclosure Take Big Money From Industry
Steve Kretzmann
Jan19
This post is cross-published from ProPublica. Congress isn’t going to regulate hydraulic fracturing any time soon. But the Department of Interior might. [2] For starters, Interior is mulling whether it should require drilling companies to disclose the chemicals they use to frack wells drilled on public lands, and already the suggestion has earned Interior Secretary…
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