Ooh, this gets uglier and uglier the harder one looks at this. From the Associated Press via ABC (hat tip reader Glenn Stehle): The federal agency responsible for ensuring that an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was operating safely before it exploded last month fell well short of its own policy that inspections […]
Read more...Many of my investor buddies e-mail each other frequently during the day (yes, e-mail, not IM or tweet) and I am on the periphery of some of their discussions. One of them took note of the fact that the libertarians in this crowd had gone silent on the question of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, […]
Read more...By Glenn Stehle, an engineer who began working in the oil industry in 1974. After a two-year stint with Cities Service Oil Company, he worked for two years for Henry Engineering, a petroleum engineering consulting firm. Upon leaving Henry Engineering he worked as an independent engineering consultant in all facets of the oil and gas […]
Read more...By Glenn Stehle, an engineer who began working in the oil industry in 1974. After a two-year stint with Cities Service Oil Company, he worked for two years for Henry Engineering, a petroleum engineering consulting firm. Upon leaving Henry Engineering he worked as an independent engineering consultant in all facets of the oil and gas […]
Read more...So far, just a headline at the Wall Street Journal: “BP Suffers Setback in Installing Containment Dome” and merely a “Breaking News” listing. From its e-mail alert: Hydrate build-up stalled placement of the containment dome over gushing oil. The BP executive of the dome said, “I would say it has failed.” Scanning other news services; […]
Read more...From Reuters: BP has given up on efforts by underwater robots to close valves on a failed blowout preventer at the site of a massive oil leak in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, an executive said on Friday. “We’ve essentially used up all those options,” Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP (BP.L) (BP.N) said […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns This comes via the FT: Saudi Arabia on Wednesday decided to drop the widely used West Texas Intermediate oil contract as the benchmark for pricing its oil, dealing a serious blow to the New York Mercantile Exchange. The decision by the world’s biggest oil exporter could encourage other producers […]
Read more...I was on the Andrew Hall/Phibro beat for a while and must confess I dropped it in the finish-the-book crunch. I neglected to follow up on and important aspect of the story that is still germane. Readers may recall the brouhaha: Hall, a high stakes oil trader, had received nearly $100 million in 2008 at […]
Read more...The famed hedge fund investor George Soros has decided to make a serious push into clean energy, not only investing in projects but also forming an organization to weigh in on policy issues. From Bloomberg: Billionaire George Soros, looking to address the “political problem” of climate change, said he will invest $1 billion in clean-energy […]
Read more...You cannot make this stuff up. The Saudis are lobbying for foreign aid in anticipation of declining oil revenues. Hat tip reader Michael: Saudi Arabia has led a quiet campaign….demanding behind closed doors that oil-producing nations get special financial assistance if a new climate pact calls for substantial reductions in the use of fossil fuels. […]
Read more...Many US commentators blithely asset that the US does not need to worry about the reserve currency status of the dollar, since there is allegedly no ready substitute. Yet those arguments ignore the fact that there has already been movement away from the greenback. The Globe and Mail in early 2008 noted: A UBS Investment […]
Read more...It isn’t uncommon for a theme or a trend to dominate how investors and analysts view a particular sector. For instance, when barriers to interstate banking were lowered, then dropped, bank consolidation was all anyone seemed able to think about, even though there were other important developments in the industry. During that era, at McKinsey, […]
Read more...This idea of China being ahead of the game in anything environment protection related probably strikes readers as ironic, given reports of extensive industrial pollution, such as air pollution on a scale that is changing weather patterns, large scale lead poisoning, and cadmium in the soil. As Forbes commented recently, “China: Where Poisoning People Is […]
Read more...While oil is a finite resource, focusing on the long term can blind one to near-term dynamics. There has been surprisingly little mention in the mainstream media of how large the current oil surplus is. The collective view seems to be that this will take care of itself in short order. But that may be […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. During Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the helm of the Federal Reserve, he was often accused of using monetary policy to target asset markets so as to keep the party going. In short, Alan Greenspan was seen by many, including myself, as the bubble blower-in-chief. All of this came […]
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