The death-defying effort to repeal the renewable fuel standard

By Gary Gentile | June 18, 2013 04:57 PM Comments (0)

The circus is coming to town.

Instead of elephants and trapeze artists, there will be motorcyclists throttling their Harleys and antique cars circling the US Capitol. They have more than spectacle in mind. They will be protesting the existence of a fuel called E15, gasoline blended with 15% ethanol.

The fuel is sold in only a handful of stations nationwide, but is touted by ethanol backers as the safety valve that will allow more renewables to be blended with gasoline. Currently, most light vehicle engines only carry a warranty for use with a 10% ethanol blend–E10. But declining gasoline demand, combined with rising biofuel blending mandates means the country will hit a “blend wall” sometime in 2014.

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Regulation & Environment: Trying to end Iraq’s wasteful natural gas flaring

By News Desk | June 17, 2013 12:01 AM Comments (1)

It’s always been a problem with natural gas that sometimes, it just can’t find a market due to a lack of transportation. Iraq is dealing with that situation. In the Oilgram News column Regulation & Environment, Tamsin Carlisle reviews the problem and steps being taken to combat it.

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The new American Airlines may trim the jet fuel hedges off

By Matt Kohlman | June 14, 2013 11:22 AM Comments (0)

Sometimes airlines are just like any neighborhood.

If all your neighbors have a dream car (or Dreamliner), you’ll want one, too. If all your neighbors have internet access (at 30,000 feet), you’ll want it, too. If all your neighbors have hedges for their yards (or jet fuel), you’ll want that, too.

So what’s the latest neighborhood gossip? It’s whether the new owner of the biggest house (airline) on the block (in the world) is going to try and keep up with the Joneses. At least when it comes to those hedges.

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CO2 by the numbers: where are we really headed?

By Jeff Ryser | June 14, 2013 10:39 AM Comments (0)

Several years ago, Brice Lalonde, who at the time was France’s ambassador to successive rounds of climate change talks, explained to me what concerned him most about the role carbon dioxide emissions play in global warming.

He argued that CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere for decades, don’t dissipate, but rather accumulate. Thus, only a huge annual reduction of CO2, starting now, has any chance of ultimately making any real difference. Small reductions hardly matter.

Frankly, Lalonde thought we were all doomed. My only counter at the time parroted that of Freeman Dyson, the theoretical physicist and mathematician who is retired and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, who reasoned, also a few years back, that we do not likely know and we cannot predict with any certainty how the chemistry in the atmosphere is going to behave over time.

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Why not put an oil refinery in the middle of nowhere?

By Jeffrey Bair | June 13, 2013 10:07 AM Comments (2)

The newspaper publisher with a plan, now in baby steps, to put a 400,000 b/d refinery in coastal British Columbia and ship its fuel products to China says the market for Canadian crude is demanding — screaming, even — for someone to get it out of the country to Asian markets.

Skeptics have been poking holes for weeks in David Black’s plan to put a refinery at the port in Kitimat, about 875 miles by car from Vancouver (map here), to process crude from the Alberta oil sands. It’s far from the crowds who line up for whale-watching off British Columbia. In fact, it’s nearly as far north as Smithers, the spot picked to film the Liam Neeson sub-Arctic thriller “The Grey.”

Black said he has no firm commitments for supply but added there is interest so far from China parties including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. He originally was lobbying oil sands producers last year to build their own refinery “with a copy of a feasibility study stuck in my back pocket.”

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Refining spike may interrupt the oversupply run, warns IEA

By Robert Perkins | June 13, 2013 09:49 AM Comments (0)

Could the current run of market over-supply and oil price weakness be shortly reversed by a large spike in global refining runs? The International Energy Agency certainly seems to think so.

The prospect of a short-lived, counter-cycle to the oversupply downside came somewhat as a surprise in the IEA’s latest monthly report this week given the otherwise persistent gloomy outlook for global oil demand.

But the OECD’s energy adviser said the seasonal ramp-up in global crude throughputs is expected to be steeper than normal this year, with runs jumping by 2.2 million b/d from the second to third quarter.

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EIA analysis: US gasoline inventories jump as demand slips

By News Desk | June 12, 2013 04:16 PM Comments (0)

US gasoline inventories jumped 2.748 million barrels last week to 221.545 million barrels, as imports climbed while demand weakened, US Energy Information Administration data showed Wednesday. The EIA data was especially bearish for NYMEX RBOB gasoline futures, as a bulk of the stock build was on the Atlantic Coast -— home of the New York-delivery point for RBOB. Supportive for New York-delivered NYMEX ULSD, however, was a nearly 1 million barrel draw in distillate stocks on the Atlantic Coast. You can read Platts’ analysis of the numbers here.

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Maersk takes players on drilling rig in ‘Quest for Oil’ computer game

By Pradeep Rajan | June 11, 2013 11:55 PM Comments (0)

The last time you filled up your tank, did you wonder where the gasoline came from? How did it begin life? And where did the crude oil come from that gave us gasoline?

Now you can go digging — or drilling — for all the answers while playing a game.

Danish shipping and oil conglomerate Maersk has launched a computer game called ‘Quest for Oil’ to help unfold the unknown universe of oil exploration.

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When the bunker fuel pool cleans up, it will be good ol’ diesel doing the job

By John Kingston | June 11, 2013 11:47 PM Comments (3)

The bottom of the barrel — residual fuel, bunker fuel, asphalt and petroleum coke — take up a little more than 5% of total US consumption. But because of new rules affecting the second of that group, bunkers, it’s about to undergo an upheaval that could easily spill over into other markets.

The consensus on day one of the Platts 10th Bunker & Residual Fuel Conference in Houston is that despite significant talk about the shipping industry getting to mandated lower sulfur levels through a variety of means — LNG or desulfurizing onboard scrubbers being the most prominent alternatives — it’s almost certainly going to be marine gasoil or marine diesel that gets the shipping industry across the finish line.

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At the Wellhead: More on the Australian coalseam gas future

By News Desk | June 10, 2013 12:01 AM Comments (0)

Last week, The Barrel featured a piece by James Bourne on the Australian coalseam gas future. He expanded on some of those same themes in this week’s Oilgram News column, At the Wellhead.

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