After 20 years of isolation, Libya has become the new “destination of choice” for oil companies trying to find new reserves. “It’s a race for our black gold,” president of the National Oil Company Shukri Ghanem said. “We are organising it like the Olympic Games and may the best one win.”
With each subsequent round of […]

The U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) has approved Shell’s plan to drill as many as a dozen exploration wells over the next two years in the Beaufort Sea.
The agency, which supervises Alaska’s oil and gas leasing released an environmental assessment that said that the project would not cause “undue or serious harm or damage to […]

The New York Times today takes issue with President Bush’s call to pass “bipartisan energy legislation” before this Congress finishes – saying that instead the “House and Senate should limit their work in this final session to as few measures as possible”.
The energy bill Bush has in mind, says the Times, is in fact two […]

Further analysis of the IEA’s World Economic Outlook reveals that oil industry has barely increased its investment in oil and natural-gas production during the past five years after accounting for inflation.Data compiled by the IEA and reported in the Wall Street Journal, show that investment in the oil-and-gas industry was $340 billion in 2005, up […]

The Guardian reports today that “money [is] no object as the big players grab what is left of a diminishing resource”, quoting the recent decision by Sinopec of China to pay $1bn for the right to explore for oil in deep water off Angola. This has “shocked” the west, “which fears it could be left […]