Tar Sands: “No Safe Way to Market”

November 30, 2011By Andy RowellBlog Post, Featured

The top brass of BP and Shell will have not been amused this morning when they opened their Financial Times to see a half page advert staring at them about the ecological cost of the tar sands. The advert, entitled: “Tar sands – 23 per cent more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil” demands that … Read More

A Culture Beyond Oil

November 29, 2011By Andy RowellBlog Post, Featured 1 Comment

“There is no money that is completely pure”, so says Nicholas Serota, the Director of the Tate gallery in London that is under fire once again for taking oil money from BP and Shell. Serota is right in many ways, there is no such thing as clean money but some funding is dirtier than others. … Read More

Chevron Faces Possible Brazil Drilling Ban

November 22, 2011By Andy RowellBlog Post, Featured 2 Comments

Eighteen months after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, we have another country threatening to ban an oil company after a deep water spill. Yesterday it was Brazil’s turn to say it might ban Chevron from drilling in its deep water oilfields as punishment for the 3,000 barrel oil spill from the company’s Frade project. Chevron has … Read More

Don’t Look Away Now

November 21, 2011By Andy RowellBlog Post, Featured

Love it or loath it as the voice of business, you can say one thing about the Financial Times, it normally covers the energy beat with a reasonable degree of accuracy. That’s why is was so disappointing to read the latest misguided comment piece by the paper’s Washington columnist Edward Luce, in an article “Look … Read More

Shale Oil Jobs “Vastly Exaggerated”

November 16, 2011By Andy RowellBlog Post, Featured

The headline in yesterday’s Financial Times said it all “Surge in shale oil output fuels US jobs bonanza”. According to the FT: “The boom in shale oil and gas production has created one bright spot in the otherwise grim US labour market.” “The rate of job growth is noteworthy,” Brian Davidson, an economist with the … Read More

What now? Reading the tea leaves on Keystone XL

November 15, 2011By Lorne StockmanBlog Post, Featured

Written by Steve Kretzmann and Lorne Stockman Last week, the Obama Administration announced that it would “examine in depth alternative routes” for the Keystone XL pipeline and that this process “could be completed as early as the first quarter of 2013”. The Administration pledged to consider “all the relevant issues together”, including climate change, energy … Read More

The New Iraqi Oil Rush

November 15, 2011By Andy RowellBlog Post, Featured

It wasn’t meant to be like this. After nearly a decade of war, chaos and bloodshed, the Iraqi oil industry was meant to be controlled by the bureaucrats and politicians from Baghdad. But Big Oil obviously has other ideas, and in the good old-fashioned way it will do deals with anyone it can so long … Read More