The UK Department of Trade and Industry resorts to wishful thinking in a new white paper orienting energy policy to targets for carbon dioxide emissions (see Newsletter, p. 7).
Market Hotline
High oil prices: war premium or physical fundamentals?
Bob Williams
As oil prices hover above $35/bbl and inch towards $40/bbl, the question persists: Is the oil price spike a war premium or a market fundamentals premium?
Lohr, Germany, has announced that Bob Rickert will step down as president and CEO of Bosch Rexroth Corp., Hoffman Estates, Ill., and be replaced by Wolfgang Dangle, currently executive vice-president and chief financial officer.
The crisis under way centering on the Venezuelan government's politicization of state-owned petroleum company Petroleos de Venezuela SA has all the makings of a national tragedy.
The White House is still analyzing the role it would play in rebuilding the oil sector in a postconflict Iraq, according to government and industry sources.
While Iraq's large proven oil reserves and its low production costs are an attraction for oil companies worldwide, the huge development costs required plus the country's transportation bottlenecks will prevent any substantial hike in oil exports in the near or even medium term, in the event of the successful outcome of a US-led war.
Predicting the availability of oil and natural gas for 20 years is "fraught with difficulties," leaving the worldwide oil and natural gas industry with huge challenges, said Pierre Jungels, president of the London-based Institute of Petroleum.
The Russian government is showing increasing confidence that it can rely on domestic oil companies to expand the country's role as a key world exporter. The most recent evidence of that came last month when Prime Minister Mikhail M. Kasyanov proposed that his country limit future production-sharing agreements and related tax guarantees with foreign investors to large, capital-intensive projects.
Robert B. Riley, executive chairman and CEO of BP Trinidad & Tobago LLC (BPTT) is the first native Trinidadian to head a multinational oil company unit operating in the twin-island Caribbean nation since the parent company began operations there nearly 40 years ago.
Devon Energy Corp., Oklahoma City, and Ocean Energy Inc., Houston, reported Feb. 24 they will merge through a stock-swap deal valued at $5.3 billion, making Devon the largest US independent oil and natural gas company, with 650,000 boe/d of production and an enterprise value of $20 billion.
Apache Corp. has appointed
Floyd R. Price and Rodney J. Eichler as corporate executive vice-presidents and Jon A. Jeppesen as corporate senior vice-president.
An evaluation of a portion of the deepwater Mozambique Channel in Madagascar territorial waters has been recently carried out by Xpronet Inc., Houston, in cooperation with l'Office des Mines Nationales et des Industries Stratégiques (OMNIS), the Malagasy government authority.
Movie images obtained with an off-the-shelf camcorder deployed on the end of a rope greatly reduced the time and cost associated with fishing and casing repair of a severely damaged shallow heavy-oil well in a cyclic-steam project.
A new forecasting methodology differs from the conventional belief that operating rates are important indicators in petrochemical margin forecasts. This new method predicts that petrochemical margins will improve in 2003.
Described here is an actual but, for security reasons, unnamed underground petroleum product storage facility in the Middle East that is protected against nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical (NBC) attack.
Field tests are under way to evaluate the use of fiber optic cable to detect intrusion along a pipeline by third-party excavators, widely documented as the most common source of damage to oil and gas pipelines.
