The article, "Time to debunk mythical links between oil and politics" (OGJ, Dec. 15, 2003, p. 18) is interesting, but the author seems more at home with the business side of oil than with the science and engineering.
Energy futures prices were up sharply during the first trading sessions of 2004, with the February contract for benchmark US light, sweet crudes jumping by $1.26 to $33.78/bbl on the New York Mercantile Exchange and West Texas Intermediate at Cushing, Okla., bounding by $1.28 to $33.78/bbl on the US spot market on Jan. 5.
Connecticut, New York, and California are working to remove the gasoline additive methyl tertiary butyl ether from the gasoline blending pool and replace it with fuel-grade ethanol.
A group led by Daewoo Corp., Seoul, spudded the Shwe-1 wildcat on the Rakhine basin shelf in the Bay of Bengal a few dozen kilometers south of southernmost Bangladesh.
Because of Iraq's vast potential oil and natural gas resources, questions surrounding the legality of contracts related to its petroleum sector are commanding great attention.
Acquisitions remain an important driver for growth for most upstream companies, especially if these companies have failed to meet market-anticipated production goals. But acquisitions don't always create value—strategies must be employed to ensure the creation of value, according to Edinburgh-based consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd. in the recently released report, "Value creation through acquisitions."
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Dec. 24 blocked a new US Environmental Protection Agency rule designed to let refiners and power generators make certain plant repairs without obtaining new clean air permits.
ChevronTexaco Corp.'s investments in Nigeria are increasingly focused on development, utilization, and marketing of that country's vast natural gas resources.
ChevronTexaco Corp. continues to emphasize development of local engineering expertise and technology-transfer efforts as it pursues several major oil and gas projects in Nigeria.
The King Kong-Yosemite deepwater development project in the Gulf of Mexico (Fig. 1) involved several technologies that companies can implement either to make smaller deepwater projects commercial or to optimize larger projects better.
The market for new LNG facilities will expand rapidly through 2007 and see total capital expenditures (capex) of more than $39 billion, according to a recent study by Douglas-Westwood, Canterbury, UK.
