Monthly Archives: March 2012

The oil patch: Big money for hard work away from home

March 31, 2012
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CARRIZO SPRINGS – A few years ago, Frankie Gonzalez was working marginal jobs and running with the wrong crowd in his hometown, San Diego, Texas. Now he’s among the many oil field workers cashing in on the gusher known as the Eagle Ford Shale.

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Russia’s Far East – Rising Energy Superpower

March 31, 2012
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Siberia has traditionally conjured up images of fearsome cold and death, first as a place of exile under the Russian Tsars and later under the murderous regime of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. A great appeal of eastern Siberia for political exile was its extreme remoteness. Originally only reachable by ship, eastern Siberia’s isolation was only somewhat alleviated by…

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EPA Proposals: End of Coal or Dawn of New Energy?

March 31, 2012
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The Environmental Protection Agency this week proposed measures that it said would cut emissions for new power plants. Critics are lining up to say this marks the end of coal-fired power generation in the United States and in some ways they may be right. Despite the fervor over things like the Keystone XL oil pipeline…

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Citigroup’s Overly Optimistic Energy Projection for 2020

March 31, 2012
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Gasoline prices remain high, and Reuters recently noted that there are enough countries with civil unrest, technical problems and bad weather that there are around a million barrels a day of possible supply that are not getting to the market. Yet with Saudi Arabia continuing to reassure that it is willing to pump more oil,…

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A New Industry to be Born from the End of North Sea Oil

March 31, 2012
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It may be small by global standards, but Britain’s oil and gas industry has far greater significance than its size suggests. Apart from providing a global oil price benchmark — Brent Crude — derived from a blend of sweet North Sea crude types, exploration techniques and production technologies pioneered in the North Sea are used…

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Turkey’s Attempts to Quell PKK Insurgency has Energy Implications

March 31, 2012
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Turkey has adopted a new strategy in its bid to solve its Kurdish “issue.” Ankara’s outreach initiative has enormous energy implications, as Turkey currently imports 90 percent of its energy supplies and many pipelines run through Turkey’s eastern Kurdish regions, a tempting target which Kurdish militants have attacked in the past. Under the new plan of Turkish…

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