“As oil has gone from $100 to $50, it’s really cut the incentives to build pipelines into North Dakota,” Bloomberg Business writer Matthew Phillips says in a video accompanying his story. “Lower prices make it more attractive for oil companies to actually use rail more than they’re using today.”
5. We won’t be fooled again. As a nation, we have seen fuel prices rise and fall. While we are all enjoying low prices today, few of us expect them to last forever.
For the past seven weeks, the U.S. has been producing and importing an average of 1 million more barrels of oil every day than it is consuming. That extra crude is flowing into storage tanks, pushing supplies to their highest point in at least 80 years.
A bipartisan majority of U.S. senators were unable to reach the two-thirds majority required to undo President Obama’s veto of the Keystone XL pipeline on Wednesday. The vote was 62 to 37.
Funders appear to be backing away from a prominent climate change denier who may have failed to disclose that his peer-reviewed articles were funded with grants from petroleum companies.
In what could be a modern-day record for election turnout in the SoCal city, Measure O was going down by a vote of 79 percent to 21 percent, at last count.
Orange County drivers, excited about cheap gasoline just a few weeks ago, are suddenly feeling the pinch as prices reverse course, rising 43 cents a gallon in the past week and more than $1 in the past month.
Consumers are not happy about it.
(Photo: David Sommars, on Flickr)
Although “all of the above,” as a slogan, was mostly created to bolster the domestic production of oil and gas, “all” meant then what it means today: A diversified energy policy that harnesses all that we have to offer.
Reuters reports that crude oil rose sharply on the last trading session of February, posting its first monthly gain since June.
Brent crude LCOc1 rose $2.53 to $62.58 a barrel. February’s 18 percent gain was the biggest monthly percentage rise since May 2009.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the oil-field services company Baker Hughes saw its rig count fall by 33 this week, to 986, dropping below 1,000 for the first time since 2011. The count is off 31 percent from the same time a year ago.
And yet:
… analysts caution a reduction in the number of U.S. oil rigs in use doesn’t immediately translate to a fall in output, which is currently running at a multiyear high of 9.3 million barrels a day.
“What can you expect from a movie that’s produced by a group whose advisers include a former CIA director, a onetime Shell Oil Co. president and a man who once headed the Rockefeller Foundation? If you answered, ‘a spirited defense of America’s oil industry,’ guess again.”
