OIL Search and Exxon Mobil have cemented themselves as the frontrunners in the race for the region"s next big gas export scheme after signing agreements to sell more than $US2 billion ($2.48bn) worth of liquefied natural gas a year from their PNG LNG project.

The project, run by Exxon and expected to cost $US12bn to develop, will supply 4.3 million tonnes of LNG a year to three Asian customers at an undisclosed price.

Japan"s Tokyo Electric Power and Osaka Gas are two of the buyers, while the other is understood to be Taiwanese.

Two million tonnes a year have already committed to China"s state-owned Sinopec. The two deals now account for the whole 6.3 million tonnes of LNG a year expected from the project in 2013 or 2014.

Sinopec, which has not been officially named as a buyer, is awaiting Chinese government approval. Exxon said it planned to sign binding deals by the end of the year.

The deals announced yesterday are the latest in a flurry of contracts as several major plants, including the massive Gorgon project in Western Australia and coal-seam gas-to-LNG plants at Gladstone, head for an investment decision this year or early next year.

Korea Gas previously said it was interested in buying from the PNG LNG project, as well as from Gorgon and Gladstone. ...

The PNG LNG project, like CSG-to-LNG projects planned by Santos and BG Group at Gladstone, is targeting unmet LNG demand around 2014 as some big regional agreements end.

Visit my Blog...

The government intends to auction off oil contracts to foreign companies for the first time since Iraq nationalised its oil industry more than three decades ago. If all goes according to plan in the first round, foreign oil companies will move in to help Iraq revive production at six developed fields that have suffered from years of war and neglect.

But Iraq"s fractious politics have complicated the process. Some lawmakers and oil officials have called for a delay of the auction. The man behind the plan, Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, appeared before Parliament yesterday, where some lawmakers questioned the legality of the proposed contracts and what they called favourable terms for the foreign companies.

But the auction appears to have sufficient political support to go ahead on schedule, and Mr Shahristani and other government officials vowed to plow ahead.

Mr Shahristani"s oil deals are crucial to this war-torn country"s economy. Iraq is thought to have one of the world"s largest supplies of crude oil, with 115 billion barrels in proven reserves. But foreign know-how is the key to its plans to boost oil output to four million barrels a day within four to five years, from 2.4m barrels now.

Despite security risks, Western oil companies are clamoring to get in. Iraq is still relatively unexplored, offering big companies a potentially easy-to-tap source of growth. Some are touting Iraq as the most important opening of petroleum fields since the discovery in 2000 of the giant Kashagan field in the Caspian Sea.

Some 120 companies have expressed interest in bidding for the contracts at the June 29 and 30 auction, according to the Oil Ministry. Thirty-five companies qualified to bid, including Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Italy"s Eni, Russia"s Lukoil and China Petroleum & Chemical, or Sinopec. The six oil fields at stake are believed to hold reserves of more than 43 billion barrels. Foreigners will not get the most prized piece of the action - ownership stakes in the reserves - but will be paid fees for ramping up output.

Just over 20 out of about 80 known oil fields in Iraq have been fully or partially developed, and most of its production comes from just three giants, north and south Rumaila and Kirkuk. Because lots of the black gold is considered relatively easy to extract, oil experts estimate that exploration and development in Iraq costs $US1.50 to $US2.25 ($1.60) a barrel, compared with about $US5 in Malaysia or $US20 in Canada. ...


Western oil companies were kicked out of Iraq in 1972, amid of a wave of nationalisation of Middle East petroleum. Oil production hit at least three million bpd before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, then fell sharply to 300,000 barrels after economic sanctions and trade embargoes were imposed. Production rebounded to about 2.5 million barrels before the US invasion in 2003.

Iraqi lawmakers have squabbled for years over a draft petroleum law that would set a legal framework for foreign companies to start drilling again. Tired of waiting, Mr Shahristani in 2008 unilaterally invited oil companies to bid on contracts. As global companies are reluctant to explore undeveloped fields in Iraq without an oil law, Mr Shahristani has focused on getting foreign help to pump from existing fields.

Visit my Blog...

China plans to start constructing 8 more strategic oil reserve bases this year, after the first batch of four have gone into operation in 2008, authoritative sources disclosed.

China started to construct its first batch of strategic oil reserve bases from 2003, altogether four in Zhenhai, Zhoushan, Huangdao and Dalian, respectively. Zhenhai and Zhoushan two strategic oil reserve bases have been in operation for nearly two years; while Huangdao and Dalian bases have gone into operation at the end of 2008. By November 2008, Huangdao base has had 40 percent of its oil tanks filled with crude oil.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China"s top economic planner, announced in 2008 that the plan for second-batch oil reserve base construction with combined storage capacity reaching 26.8 million cubic meters has been completed. And construction of 8 strategic oil reserve bases including Jinzhou is expected to start in 2009.

However, no official information concerning specific sites of the 8 bases in the second batch to be constructed has been disclosed.

Visit my Blog...

Visit my Blog...

Visit my Blog...

Visit my Blog...

Breaking our dependence on fossil fuels isn"t only a solution for halting our climate changing emissions, it"s also about gaining energy independence and being cautious about when we reach peak oil.

The Rocky Mountain Institute has created a new oil map web tool that intricately illustrates this concept. RMI partnered with Google to create a visual representation of how much oil the U.S. has imported, from where, and how much we have spent during every month since 1973.

The team at RMI reminds us that if we take control of our energy future, we can change the way this map looks. About five years ago, RMI"s Chief Scientist, Chairman and Co-founder Amory Lovins and a team of RMI collaborators wrote a roadmap for the United States to get completely off oil by 2050. The project resulted in a book called Winning the Oil Endgame. You can download it here.

Although disturbing in what it represents, the interactive map is quite entertaining and useful. (I found it interesting to look for connections between spikes, sources and U.S. foreign relations.) To know where we"re going, it"s important to know where we"ve been. Being able to visualize an issue, to see how much is where, and coming from who, is important and helpful when trying to imagine a future without those supplies or relationships. Weaning ourselves off a resource we are so evidently addicted to will be difficult, but it will be much easier and more exciting to plan for than the alternative option of panic and scarcity.

Liver cysts and tylenol pills
Depot provera
Products related to viagra
Ultram 200mg
Amlodipine transdermal gel for cats
Exelon competitors
Secondary lithium battery skc korea
Contraindications for triphala
Vitamin supplements for adhd
Ultracet m-o 650
Battle of crec genose armour

Visit my Blog...

Visit my Blog...

There is a growing consensus among those who follow such things, that the new high of world oil production (87.9 million barrels a day) reached last July is likely to go down in history as the all-time peak.

This is by no means a unanimous opinion.

The official government forecasting agencies, the IEA and the EIA, have devised rather bizarre scenarios that would allow oil production to ease higher for another 20 years or so. These organizations, or course, are not free agents both being bound by political strictures rather than a search for truth. While the world"s governments are inching closer to public acknowledgement of peak oil, they have many diverse responsibilities such as maintaining the domestic tranquility, fighting various kinds of wars, and providing some semblance of financial stability. Clearly a sudden admission that world oil production had just entered an irreversible decline would not help with these other responsibilities. Optimists and those unwilling to contemplate the ramifications of rapid change are still maintaining that oil production will grow in some mysterious manner for the foreseeable future.

Most students of the subject at first thought that world oil production was going to peak for geological reasons --- the inability to find and produce enough oil to keep our annual consumption of 30 billion barrels increasing. In recent years, "above ground" factors such as wars, nationalistic governments, and failure to invest have become the popular reasons for constraints on increasing world oil production among those who for one reason or another do not like the geologic (running out of reserves) argument.

While all these factors are contributing to the likelihood that from here on out less and less oil will be produced, it seems that the initial decline in production will come because the world economic situation has deteriorated so much that we simply don"t need 87.9 million barrels a day (b/d) of oil anymore.

At the minute, OPEC is scrambling to figure out how to enforce an equitable production cut to drive prices higher again. Current talk is that it will take cuts totaling 3 million b/d or more to balance supply and demand. If reductions on this order actually take place in the near future, then world production which has been declining since July will have started on a downward slope from which it is unlikely to ever recover.

New oil production and refining projects are being cut back right and left due to low prices, lack of demand, and the inability to borrow money. It will take several years for these cutbacks in investment to affect oil production; in the meantime, depletion will take over and cause irreversible declines in oil production in the next five to ten years.

In the three-way struggle among worldwide oil depletion, new oil production projects, and the global recession, we have a pretty good handle on depletion and new projects, but appreciation of the depth and length of the recession is not well understood. What was widely believed last year to be a couple of weak quarters is now generally acknowledged to be the worst economic slump since World War II. Optimists, especially on Wall Street and in Detroit, are saying that by 2010, or 2011, or 2012, the recession should be over and economic growth will return. There is great faith that the world"s governments can manage a recovery by lowering interest rates, pumping trillions of government money into the financial system, loaning money to failing corporations, and instituting massive stimulus packages. Some are not so sure.

Whatever the root causes of our new recession - bad lending practices, leverage, too much debt, lax regulations, or as some believe, high oil prices - it is clear that it is going to be worldwide, serious and will take some time, perhaps years, to work itself out. The last recession of this scope went on for ten years and picked up the name of "the great depression" somewhere along the way.

The role of oil in the nature and duration of the recovery from all this will be critical. Should OPEC succeed in driving oil prices back up to $75 or $100 a barrel by imposing serious restrictions on production, then, as we saw last summer, money will be drained from the recovery into oil producers" coffers, but there will be more incentive to invest in new production. Gasoline prices, however, will climb again and consumers will be back where they were last spring.

Most of us have heard about the impending arrival of “peak oil,” after which oil supplies will inexorably dwindle, causing all sorts of havoc as societies try to cope and remake themselves. But my friend Michel Bauwens of the Peer to Peer Foundation, recently suggested that we may be approaching another inflection point of equal or greater significance, if we have not already – the arrival of “peak hierarchy.” By this, he meant the time at which distributed organizations become stronger and more versatile than centralized hierarchies.

Traditionalists scoff at the idea that big, familiar institutions are vulnerable. But the events of the past two months might well be taken as a warning of disruptions to come. The fall of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the bailout of AIG and Citicorp, and the impending bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler – and not to mention troubles at dozens of lesser-known but important corporations – might be seen as different aspects of the same financial crisis. But it may make equal or better sense to see the current turmoil as evidence of structural deficiencies of large institutions.

The liquidity problem in financial markets is more accurately described as a failure of social trust. People increasingly don’t believe that their money will be safe with large, once-reliable institutions even when the U.S. Government is providing backup guarantees. That’s why Injecting lots of new money into companies isn’t necessarily improving liquidity. The deeper problem is a lack of trust – and money alone can’t solve that.

Why should we trust large, centralized institutions that are not transparent in their dealings, and that allow well-placed insiders to game the system to their own advantage? There are all sorts of legal and regulatory checks that are supposed to prevent abuses of the system, of course. But when these safeguards are vested with large, centralized institutions that have themselves been compromised and gamed – the credit rating companies, the SEC and other regulatory agencies, Congress itself – then it should not be surprising that fraudulent, self-serving behaviors occur. The financial crisis is simply a confirmation of what many people already knew: we were (and are) caught up in big-time institutional lying (and evasion, spin and denial).

It always makes for better drama to have a Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky or villain who betrayed his duties or the public trust as an individual. But the crisis that we now find ourselves in is not just about a few bad apples (though there are plenty of them!). It’s about institutional failure on a colossal scale supported by pathological cultural norms.

The real problem is getting the economy started again is restoring trust. Existing institutional structures are not trusted. The culture of spin, evasion and lying has become so pervasive, and so institutionalized in the everyday practices of business, that it is hard to imagine re-booting the economy afresh. Everyone has the reasonable suspicion that no one is to be trusted. Everyone clings tightly to his or her money. And the economy stagnates and declines.

Think of the many institutional shams that were, and are, treated as credible: television’s Sweeps Weeks as a gauge of a network’s base audience, EPA’s risk assessments of chemicals, the mainstream press’ pre-war reporting on Iraq, the energy and auto industry’s dismissals of global warming; the safety of subprime mortgage securities and credit default swaps. The list could easily be expanded.

A friend of mine who is trying to raise money for a startup tech company put it this way: “Businesspeople realize that they were lying – and they know the people they were doing deals with were liars. And they know that the other guys know that they had been lying.” How, then, in this rampant culture of deception, the logical endpoint of a laissez-faire market without effective government oversight, does one begin to restore trust?

In a way, it all backs up to George W. Bush. When you lie as a tactic for starting a war and torturing civilians and suspending due process of law – among dozens of other mendacious official policies – and no one holds you to account! – it should not be surprising that leaders of major industries think that they, too, can shave the truth and get away with it. The very idea of responsibility becomes the province of suckers.

It is of a piece, then, that Treasury Secretary Paulson actually proposed a $700 billion taxpayer bailout without bothering to explain or itemize how this unprecedented sum would actually be spent. (Now – surprise, surprise – the congressional Government Accountability Office has found that the accountability mechanisms for the bailout plan are grossly inadequate.) When the Big Three automakers came to Congress, asking for a bailout, they didn’t even take the trouble to describe their plan for rehabilitating themselves or how they would spend the money. And of course, the CEOs all flew into Washington on their vastly expensive corporate jets. Large and insulated from the market, GM staked its fortunes on selling high-profit-margin gas-guzzlers and SUVs for a generation. It reasonably thought it could make the market rather than have to respond to it. Now the bill has come due.

The common denominator of large institutions is their ability to manipulate and escape the on-the-ground realities that lesser mortals must abide by.

Which brings us back to “peak hierarchy.” The vignettes I cite may be explainable by all sorts of industry-specific realities and by the collapse of financial markets. Yet the larger point may be that large, centralized institutions are more brittle and less trustworthy than we may have suspected. And there are increasingly viable alternatives that are smaller and more innovative, flexible and socially attractive.

In a more diversified, modular marketplace, the failure of a company is no big deal. In a concentrated market dominated by a few big players, the incentive structures are all wrong. Why innovate and compete? Why operate transparently? Why work to cultivate social trust? If sheer market power or political lobbying won’t solve a problem (or steamroller over it), glitzy marketing will at least tamp it down.

Large institutions invariably find ways to leverage their powers to serve their own interests and defeat accountability – especially when their overseers (politicians and government agencies) are themselves large institutions who share the same bed. Large companies can often structure their markets and business practices in self-serving ways. They can carry out questionable dealings in the shadows. They can deploy their lobbyists to win government sanction for dubious business practices. And then, if anything goes wrong, they can invoke their sheer size and number of employees, are argue that they are too big to fail. Government must come to the rescue or the consequences for innocent third parties will be too severe.

The second part to this argument about “peak hierarchy” is the alternative: an environment of smaller, more distributed players. Michel Bauwens makes a powerful case for the ascendance of peer production, governance and property. It is not a moralistic case, but a functional one (which happens to have more socially benign and democratically attractive outcomes).

Anthropologists who study evolution believe that once a group of humans becomes larger than 150 people, they need to invent hierarchies in order to structure relationships and assure social trust. What is new about our times – the age of the Internet – is that you can now functionally coordinate small groups of people on a global scale. Social trust doesn’t need to be organized by hierarchical organizations; it can arise from the bottom up and self-organize into small groups that share common values and purposes. Such distributed networks have given us GNU Linux and open source software, Wikipedia, social networking, the Public Library of Science and other open-access journals, and countless other online commons.

This is something new under the sun: a new and functional mode of organizational life.

For the moment, the peer production economy is mostly occurring online, dealing with intangible products like creative works and information. But the social dynamics of peer production are proving to be astonishingly effective in organizing the creative energies of huge numbers of dispersed people. Could it be the template for similar changes in the “real world” of conventional industry? Will its institutional norms of mass participation, transparency and accountability begin to “compete” with hierarchical institutions?

We are already seeing this kind of change. Think Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Brittanica. Think how the Obama Internet-driven campaign out-maneuvered McCain mass-media campaign and raised huge amounts from small donors. Think how bloggers, news aggregators and Craigslist are undermining daily newspapers. Think how open source software continues to expand its domain of influence at the expense of proprietary software. Think how small groups of ethnic exiles use the Internet to affect politics in their native countries, or how the record, film and television industries are being challenged by YouTube, Facebook and countless user-driven websites.

The peer production vision is still relatively small and undeveloped, and large institutions remain quite entrenched and powerful. But no one said that the era of hierarchy is over; just that the “peak” may have passed, and that the future belongs to a different kind of logic. There will be denials, just as “peak oil” is still contested by some. But it is an illuminating perspective when considering the deep origins of our current crisis.

Visit my Blog...

They said that any funds awarded by the courts would have to go into cleaning the soil, rivers, streams and groundwater over a 1,700 square mile area. That is, as far as I know, the largest toxic site in the world. And if it only costs shell $27 B to clean it up, I"d say that"s a pretty good number, considering the damage done.

The scientists estimated that the area has had roughly 1,400 more deaths from cancer than could be accounted for by natural causes.

The trial will be ruled sometime in 2009, the Chevron is questioning the validity of the entire Ecuadorian court system (which it once praised, back when they were pleased to use it instead of the United States court system.) We"ll see if they will actually have to pay for the damage they have caused.

Via Market Watch

Visit my Blog...