Deepwater Horizon Firm Gives Execs Safety Bonuses, with No Apparent Sense of Irony. By Jess Zimmerman, Grist, 4/4/11. “Transocean, the offshore drilling firm that ran the Deepwater Horizon rig, has given its top execs massive bonuses for having ‘the best year in safety performance in our company's history… Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record as measured by our total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate.’… Transocean said that executives would be getting a 3.8% raise, millions in stock options, and a cash bonus of 44.8 percent of their ‘target bonus opportunity. What’s that mean? Well, for the CEO (who’s not getting a bonus, having just gotten a promotion and a raise), ‘target bonus opportunity’ would be his full annual salary of $900,000, so he would be getting over $400,000.”

The Sands Of Canada: Oil Supply Salvation or Sinkhole? By Richard Read, Oregonian, 12/4/10. “In vast strip mines north of this Alberta boomtown, shovel machines bigger than five-story buildings rip out tar-soaked sand, dumping 400-ton loads in trucks that feed the voracious U.S. appetite for oil. Factories in Canada's ‘oil sands,’ site of the world's largest single oil deposit, use super-heated water to purify the rich black glop. Much of the petroleum is piped to U.S. refineries, making Canada -- not Saudi Arabia or Venezuela -- America's top oil supplier. A century and a half into the petroleum age, oil companies have depleted many accessible, politically friendly reserves. Rising energy prices might be expected to encourage investment in solar, wind and other alternatives, and to some extent they do. Yet if the $200 billion poured into the oil sands so far is any indication, bigger money will flow worldwide to ever more expensive fossil fuels…

“Alberta's oil deposits, formed from tiny creatures left by an ancient sea, cover an area more than half the size of Oregon. They contain perhaps 2 trillion barrels, equal to the entire world's remaining recoverable reserves of conventional oil. But because of bitumen's gluey nature, it's difficult to extract. Only about 170 billion barrels are considered recoverable with today's technology. More than 80 projects in Canada's oil patch already produce about 1.5 million barrels a day, more than Texas or Qatar. Production will triple if all proposed and announced projects are completed -- as they probably will be, given current oil prices at $87 a barrel, well above the threshold for profits.”

Heavier Crudes, Heavier Footprints. By Janet Raloff, Science News, 12/3/10. “Relying on heavy oils and tar sands as the feedstock for liquid fuels will exaggerate the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with fossil-fuel use, a new study finds. Light crudes are the easiest to work with. But as their biggest and most accessible reservoirs have been tapped -- and often tapped out -- the oil industry has increasingly been turning to what has been termed ‘unconventional’ stocks. These are viscous, if not tarry, forms of petroleum. And as the upper graph below shows, the average ‘gravity’ -- viscosity of crude -- has fallen into the heavy range (below an average of about 31 degrees on the American Petroleum Institute scale) beginning in 2000… it takes extra work to convert viscous gunk into the gasoline, diesel and other high-value fuels that power engines the world over. And the extra fuel that powers those upgrades releases bonus greenhouse-gas emissions, thereby upping the carbon footprint of each gallon of refined product created.”

Alaska’s NPRA Reserves Estimate Lowered 90% by USGS. By Michael Graham Richard, treehugger, 10/27/10. “The National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPRA) is a piece of land owned by the United States federal government located west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). While it gets less press than ANWR, it is another target of the ‘drill baby drill!’ crowd. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has just released a revised estimate on the amount of ‘undiscovered’ oil and gas that is likely to be found in the area, and let's just say that it is a cold shower for fans of more drilling in Alaska.

“The U.S. Geological Survey estimates 896 million barrels of conventional, undiscovered oil and 53 trillion cubic feet of conventional, undiscovered non-associated gas within NPRA and adjacent state waters. The estimated volume of undiscovered oil is significantly lower than in 2002, when the USGS estimated there was 10.6 billion barrels of oil. The new estimate, roughly 10% of the 2002 estimate, is due primarily to the incorporation of new data from recent exploration drilling revealing gas occurrence rather than oil in much of NPRA.

“Considering that the world consumption of oil has been hovering around 85 million barrels per day, and the U.S. represents about a quarter of that, there's only enough oil in NPRA to fuel the world for about 10-12 days, or the US for about 45 days.”

Hillary Clinton Says U.S. Needs Canadian ‘Dirty Oil'. By David Ebner, TorontoGlobe&Mail, 10/22/10. “The United States needs Canada’s ‘dirty oil,’ the energy-hungry country is set to concede after a raucous environmental debate that has threatened the expansion of Alberta’s oil sands. The U.S. especially needs the oil sands to keep the country’s crucial refining hub on the Gulf Coast humming, a key factor that underpins the U.S. government’s likely approval of a controversial new oil sands pipeline... But the swirling political debate appears to be near an end. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has confronted the reality of the United States’ energy situation and decided that the U.S. needs Canada’s oil sands. It might be ‘dirty oil,’ she said in a key speech last week, but supporting the flow of the oil is a necessary part of a ‘very hard balancing act’ between energy security and the pursuit of new clean energy technologies. The Gulf Coast around Houston is the largest refining hub in the U.S., but supply to the region has dwindled because output in Mexico is in decline and Venezuela is moving some of its oil elsewhere for political reasons. The difficult-to-refine oil from the oil sands is similar to the crude oil from Mexico and Venezuela.”

Alberta Oil Sands Effort Turns on a Fight Over an Idaho Road. By Tom Zeller, NYTimes, 10/21/10. “International oil companies are angling to use a meandering, backcountry route in the American Northwest to ship gargantuan loads of equipment from Vancouver, Wash., to Montana and the tar sands of Alberta in Canada. But residents in Idaho object.”

Chevron Announces 2 Giant Drilling Ventures in Gulf. By Clifford Krauss, NYTimes, 10/21/10. “Just nine days after the Obama Administration lifted the deepwater drilling moratorium, Chevron announced on Thursday that it was going forward with a $7.5 billion project to develop two giant deepwater fields in the gulf. The Jack and St. Malo fields hold in excess of 500 million barrels of recoverable hydrocarbons, the company said. That’s roughly equal to the world’s oil consumption in about five day.”

Climate Protesters Block U.K. Oil Refinery. The Ecologist, 10/19/10. “Last weekend [10/16-17/10] hundreds of protesters blockaded the road to the Coryton Oil Refinery in Essex, the UK's busiest oil depot. The demonstration was supported by a large number of activist groups including; Plane Stupid, UK Tar Sands Network, Earth First and Camp for Climate Action. Protesters said they had managed to stop around 375,000 gallons of fuel from leaving the depot, owned by Petroplus, during the blockage. Find out more at CrudeAwakening.org.uk.”

Big Oil Influencing University Climate Research, According to Study. By Margot Roosevelt, LATimes, 10/14/10. “Have hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from major oil companies compromised the ethics of energy research at such institutions as UC Berkeley, UC Davis and Stanford? That's what Jennifer Washburn, a longtime critic of academic conflicts of interest, contends in Big Oil Goes to College [PDF, 220 pp], a new report that delves into the details of contracts signed between 10 major U.S. universities and global oil companies. According to the 212-page study, released by the Center for American Progress… such companies as BP, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips have funded more than $800 million in potentially compromised research with few protections for academic independence.”

Shareholders Challenge Big Oil Efforts to Kill California Climate Law. ClimateBiz, 10/14/10. “Shareholders have filed resolutions with three oil companies asking for their respective boards of directors to review political spending and policies in light of their support for overturning California's climate change law. Occidental Petroleum, Valero Energy and Tesoro have collectively poured millions of dollars into the campaign for Proposition 23, which would suspend the Global Warming and Solutions Act of 2006, also known as AB 32, until the unemployment rate dropped to 5.5% for lower for one year. Unemployment in the nation's most populous state now stands at above 12%.

“The Unitarian Universalist Association filed the resolution with Valero, while the Nathan Cummings Foundation was the primary filer in the Tesoro resolution. Green Century Capital Management filed the resolution with Occidental. ‘That Valero and the other companies are using company money for such overt political purposes is both inappropriate and reflects poor governance. Beyond stifling California's fast-growing clean tech economy, rolling back this law will delay the nation's much needed transition to a clean energy economy and greater energy independence,’ Mindy Lubber, president of the nonprofit Ceres, and director of the Investor Network on Climate Risk, said in a statement Wednesday.”

Deep-Water Drilling Moratorium Lifted: Neither Side is Happy. By Mark Guarino, CSMonitor, 10/12/10. “The Obama administration lifted its moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico Tuesday (10/12/10), replacing it with what Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is calling a “gold standard” of safety standards for operators looking to drill in water depths greater than 500 feet. Following the announcement, environmental groups said that it was ‘premature’ to lift the moratorium, while oil-industry operators worried that federal regulators are not finished creating new drilling standards.

“Among the new safety measures: 1) Operators must have their blowout preventer inspected and its design reviewed by an independent third party. 2) They must present a report showing how they would prevent or reduce a blowout at the wellhead. 3) They must get all their casing designs and cementing procedures certified by a professional engineer... The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which issues new permits for deep-water drilling in the Gulf, is ‘working to develop additional rules and guidelines’ past what is being established this week, said director Michael Bromwich. In the meantime, he added, ‘We will not approve permits or make decisions before the appropriate safeguards are in place.’”

Sen. Landrieu Blocks Approval of White House Budget Director As Protest Against Offshore Drilling Moratorium. Reuters, 9/28/10. "President Barack Obama's pick for budget chief has been blocked in the U.S. Senate by a member of his own party to protest the administration's ban on offshore oil drilling. The action by Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, means the Senate will not be able to approve Jack Lew as White House budget chief until at least mid-November, when it returns from a six-week break. Obama could temporarily appoint Lew to head the Office of Management and Budget while the Senate is out of town, which would help the administration as it tries to work out a budget for the fiscal year that starts October 1, 2011. Lew, who also headed the office under President Bill Clinton, would require Senate approval to remain on the job beyond January 2012. In a statement, Landrieu said she blocked the appointment to protest the offshore drilling ban, which the administration imposed in the wake of BP's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico."

Push for Tar-Sands Pipeline Sparks Fierce Hill Debate. By Elana Schor, Greenwire, 10/1/10. "2010 was marked by pitched environmental battles that Congress left unsettled as the clock wound down. But some of the season's most intense political jockeying has come over a seven billion dollar project that lawmakers can neither approve nor veto. The 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline would carry up to 900,000 barrels per day of Canadian oil sands to Texas refineries, nearly doubling U.S. imports from a crude reserve ranked as the second-largest in the world… TransCanada Corp. CEO Russ Girling said 'The way I'd characterize the split is, there are those supportive of the import of Canadian oil because the U.S. needs oil for a long time yet to come,' By contrast, he added, critics of the oil sands are 'focused on shutting down what most would say would be the most reliable source of crude oil to America.' TransCanada's message is simple: If America does not take advantage of the oil sands, other nations will... p

"Meanwhile, national and local environmental advocates are meeting TransCanada's efforts with a redoubled campaign of their own. Several Nebraska green groups launched a telephone and Internet tip line this week aimed at collecting local concerns over the company's threat to use powers of eminent domain against landowners who live in the pipeline's planned path. Jane Kleeb, chief of the liberal-leaning Bold Nebraska group, which helped create the new tip line, said she sees TransCanada's volley of radio and print ads in the state 'backfiring' among residents."

Marcellus Shale Fight Takes New Turn in Pennsylvania with Pipeline Mandate. By Andrew Maykuth, PhillyInquirer, 9/30/10. "In a sharp rebuke of one of the state's biggest Marcellus Shale gas drillers, Pennsylvania regulators on Thursday ordered an $11.8 million pipeline built to deliver water to Dimock Township residences whose household wells are contaminated by natural gas. In response, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., the Texas driller whose wells the state blames for the pollution, denounced the decision as 'unfounded, irrational, and capricious' and accused DEP Secretary John Hanger of 'obvious political pandering.' The atmosphere in Susquehanna County, which borders New York state north of Scranton, has become so polarized that Cabot crews now travel with uniformed escorts after an enraged Dimock resident drew a handgun on an employee."

China and Russia Mark Completion of Pipeline. Xinhua, 9/27/10. "Chinese President Hu Jintao and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, attended a ceremony in Beijing on Monday to mark the completion of the China-Russia crude oil pipeline… Construction of the 999-kilometer pipeline began last year. Some 927 kilometers of the pipeline is in China while 72 kilometers of it is in Russia. The pipeline starts in the Russian town of Skovorodino in the far-eastern Amur region and enters China at Mohe County before continuing to Daqing, a petrochemicals hub in northeastern China. The pipeline is part of a bilateral loan-for-oil deal reached in February 2009 between the two countries. Under the deal, China makes a $25-billion-long-term loan to Russia while Russia supplies China with 300 million tons of oil through pipelines from 2011 until 2030."

Palau, at Risk from Rising Seas, Aims to Drill for Oil. By Justin Nobel, Reuters, 9/27/10. "Palau is a paradox: The low-lying Pacific island nation is threatened by climate change but may soon be drilling for oil. Seismic tests in the 1970s indicated the presence of petroleum but exploratory wells were never dug. Now, President Johnson Toribiong is pushing for exploration, hopeful oil will bring cheaper fuel, revenue and jobs. 'Right now we are importing fossil fuel and that is very, very expensive,' Toribiong said in a telephone interview. 'If we find oil we will use the proceeds to make Palau a green country.'"

Big Oil and Other Industries Spend Over $500 Million Against Climate Legislation. ClimateProgress, 9/27/10. "The oil, gas, and coal industries have spent over $2 billion lobbying Congress since 1999. These three industries combined spent a whopping $543 million on lobbying in 2009 and the first two quarters of 2010. Meanwhile, alternative energy companies spent less than $32 million on lobbying efforts in 2009 and have only spent $14.8 million this year. The 20 biggest-spending oil, mining, and electric utility companies shelled out $242 million on lobbying from January 2009 to June 2010. Trade associations that generally oppose clean energy policies spent another $290 million during this time. This is over $1,800 in lobby expenditures a day for every single senator and representative. Six of the seven companies with the largest lobbying expenditures are Big Oil companies -- ExxonMobil (1), ConocoPhillips (2), Chevron (3), BP (5), Koch Industries (6), and Shell (7). Their 18-month lobbying expenditures total $143 million. Their agenda varies among companies, but generally they oppose most proposals to reduce global warming pollution from oil refineries and transportation fuels. And they seek to limit companies' liability for oil spills like the BP oil disaster."

Boom Times Back at Alberta's Oil Sands. By Sandro Contenta, GlobalPost, September 17, 2010. "The boom times are back at Alberta's oil sands. What environmentalists describe as one of the worst emitters of greenhouses gases on earth has shaken off the recession. Its massive oil extraction projects now employ 27,700 workers - 3% more than the previous peak in 2008. It's a sign that the United States' gluttonous appetite for the tar-like mix of bitumen and sand isn't expected to subside any time soon. America, after all, is pretty much the only client for what President Barack Obama's advisers once derided as Alberta's 'dirty' oil…

"It's no surprise, therefore, that when Nancy Pelosi visited Canada last week, lobbyists on both sides of the oil sands debate requested face time with the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Pelosi obliged. Accompanying her was Congressman Edward Markey, the Democratic chair of the House energy and environment subcommittee. The backdrop to their meetings at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa is a growing battle on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. It pits those who see oil sands development as the biggest single source of new greenhouse gases against those who see it as a secure source of oil and high-paying jobs."

Greenpeace Protesters Block Greenland Drilling. AP, August 31, 2010. "The activists breached a 1,650-feet (500-meter) security perimeter around the Stena Don rig off western Greenland, climbed up the rig and fastened themselves to it... The breach triggered an automatic shutdown of the rig's operations... The drilling in the Arctic has sparked condemnation from Greenpeace, whose activists are worried that an oil rush would damage the region's fragile ecosystem... Drilling for fossil fuels off Greenland's west coast resumed in 2001, three decades after a previous effort failed to find oil."

Scientists Tussle Over Gulf Oil Tally. By John Collins Rudolf, NYTimes, August 17, 2010. "When the Obama administration released scientific findings in early August estimating that roughly three-quarters of the oil from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico had been captured, burned, dispersed, evaporated, degraded or dissolved in the water, a number of independent scientists cried foul, describing the report as premature and suggesting that it was portraying the ecological impact of the spill in an unduly rosy light... A team of Georgia researchers has codified that dissent, using the government's own data to craft a report estimating that as much as 79% of the oil spilled from the Deepwater Horizon well in fact remains at large in the Gulf of Mexico, where it still poses a threat to the marine ecosystem... [These] The estimates... are difficult to contrast with those in the federal report as they do not take into account the roughly 800,000 barrels of oil captured by BP directly at the wellhead. And the Georgia report, unlike the federal analysis, was not subject to peer review."