Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Escalating sabotage against pipelines in Iraq is heightening fears that terrorists are planning a wholesale assault on energy targets throughout the region and are taking aim at the world’s largest oil supplier — Saudi Arabia.
With all Iraq’s oil exports halted by sabotage, gunmen killed a top Iraqi oil official on Wednesday in a new blow to an interim government reeling from violence two weeks before U.S.-led occupation formally ends.
Petroleum giant BP said yesterday that world oil supplies remained plentiful, despite growing concerns about the remaining global reserves of crude.
Russia has sent signals that it could clear the way for the construction of private oil pipelines as a way to increase petroleum exports to the West.
Throughout southern Africa, cable theft is ubiquitous, a sort of third-world analog to first-world thefts of car radios.
Many geologists believe we are in for a period of significantly higher oil prices, while nearly all economists and the analyst community predict oil prices will fall. Who do you believe?
It is far from clear, experts say, whether the existing fleet can handle the new production that Saudi Arabia and others have promised in coming months.
Central African leaders officially opened the taps Saturday on one of the largest private investments in sub-Saharan Africa – a 663-mile, $3.7 billion pipeline snaking from Chad through virgin rain forests to the Atlantic.
Iraq’s interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said those who attack the country’s power grid and oil pipelines are “traitors” and “not freedom fighters,” and he called on Iraqis to defeat the saboteurs.
Facing runaway oil prices and security fears, East Asian officials meeting in Manila will make emergency plans that included creating oil reserves and finding alternative sources for their energy imports.
From his spare office over a grocery store in Geneva, Conrad Gerber can sway world oil markets. Mr Gerber runs a small firm, Petro-Logistics, that collects and analyses data on the world’s supplies of oil. His confidential reports, which cost his select list of clients as much as $ 5,000 a month, often find their way into the business press, typically causing jumps or dips in the volatile petroleum markets.
Forget about terrorists. Don’t give another thought to SARS. The single greatest threat to the U.S. right now comes from a critical shortage of natural gas.
