Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sharing oil reserves among Asian nations could be an option for countries in the region if crude prices stay high, Japanese Trade Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said on Tuesday as oil soared to a record above $50 a barrel.
Much to the consternation of the European Union, which now numbers several former Soviet bloc nations among its members, Russia through its natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, has spun a web of control over energy supplies extending from Estonia on the Baltic Sea to Bulgaria on the Black Sea.
The world’s largest wind power project will begin construction this month near Beijing, bringing green energy and cleaner air to the 2008 Summer Olympics and city residents coping with some of the worst air pollution in the world.
Russia and China agreed to terms for Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization during top-level talks in Moscow on Friday, but both sides left unanswered questions about whether Russia was ready to guarantee stable oil supplies and boost oil and gas deliveries in the future to its energy-hungry neighbor.
A self-taught inventor has signed a contract with Country Energy, one of the country’s biggest power grids, to test a new source of clean and renewable electricity that will harness ocean currents and has the potential to drastically reduce electricity costs on islands.
The Russian government has chosen to run a planned new oil pipeline opening its huge eastern Siberian fields up to the Asia-Pacific market via Japan rather than China, Moscow’s ambassador to Tokyo said.
Booming China, with its voracious appetite for oil and urgent need for oil security, is considering a China-Myanmar oil pipeline and one through Thailand. These are among 10 recent proposals on alternative strategies to secure China’s energy supplies.
A terrorist attack on an LNG tanker “would have the force of a small nuclear explosion,” according to the chairman of Lloyd’s, a British insurer of natural gas port facilities like the ones being proposed in Fall River and Providence.
Oil prices fell on Wednesday as Hurricane Ivan, one of the strongest storms on record, cut the demand for crude oil by shutting nearly 13 per cent of US refining capacity.
Explosive growth has made the People’s Republic of China the most power-hungry nation on
earth. Get ready for the mass-produced, meltdown-proof future of nuclear energy.
For a decade Washington has backed the Turkish and Azerbaijan governments to steer the export of Caspian region crude oil away from Russia. Russia’s newest riposte has been to ally the Russian and Iranian oil industries, and open up the shortest, cheapest and most lucrative oil route of all, southwards out of the Caspian to Iran.
Some of the world’s biggest oil-producing countries have reduced their investment in new capacity despite record oil prices. The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries this week revealed its members drilled 6.5 per cent fewer wells in 2003, suggesting the global supply crunch and high oil prices could last longer than expected, analysts said. The numbers appear to contradict statements by Opec members that they are actively building extra capacity.
