By Brian Scheid | November 9, 2012 08:56 AM Comments (0)
After this summer’s record drought, a devastating superstorm and the end of the most expensive election in history, President Obama brought up climate change this week.
“We want our kids to grow up in a world…that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of the warming planet,” said Obama in his victory speech.
By Christine Forster | October 12, 2012 09:38 AM Comments (1)
In what is traditionally a male-dominated industry, one of Australia’s oil refiners is showing its feminine side, recently unveiling what is believed to be the nation’s most generous workplace support package for new parents.
Caltex Australia, which is chaired by a woman, says the move is “ground-breaking” because it goes beyond corporate Australia’s traditional focus on giving employees paid leave just before and after the birth of a baby, to focus on providing cash for parents to make their own childcare choices after they are back at work. Read the rest of this entry »
By Jeff Ryser | August 15, 2012 10:11 AM Comments (0)
I had the opportunity August 8 at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, to hear “the Big Dog” speak, which is what one of my editors in Washington calls former President Bill Clinton.
Clinton, at 26, and his then-girlfriend Hilary Rodham, spent time in Dallas and in Austin running George McGovern’s Texas campaign for president in 1972 when I was at the University of Texas.
By Tim Worledge | April 26, 2012 05:54 PM Comments (0)
Sales people the world over have their own idioms, in-jokes or phrases to describe that ultimate sale. In Victorian Britain, so the story goes, a US businessman once succeeded in selling coal to Newcastle, one of the UK’s more mineral-rich regions. The incident has passed into the language as the definition of just such a situation.
Flash forward to the 21st century, and a press release from Finland’s oil company Neste, published Thursday, seems to provide the modern equivalent of achieving that impossible sale.
Neste has sold renewable diesel to the United States.
By News Desk | March 8, 2012 02:37 PM Comments (0)
Eight different Platts journalists have been at the CERAWeek meeeting since Monday, some the entire time, others in and out. We’ve all been running from press room to briefing room to panel to the food table. There’s been a lot of information to digest; here is our attempt to report on some of the most significant trends we heard about.
By News Desk | January 23, 2012 10:08 AM Comments (0)
Canada’s official exit from the Kyoto treaty — an act undertaken by one of the pact’s biggest public supporters — could be seen as a significant win for the oil sands industry. But that sector is facing a host of other issues, including rising costs. Platts correspondent Gary Park, in this week’s Oilgram News column “Petrodollars,” reviews the landscape.
By Gerry Karey | November 28, 2011 12:44 PM Comments (0)
Negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations produced the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. It was a watershed event, marking the first international agreement curbing emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial countries.
The Protocol mandated a five-year first-commitment period setting levels of emission reductions, starting in 2008 and ending December 31, 2012. Thus began a decade-and-a-half countdown to negotiate and ratify “a new international framework [by 2012] that can deliver the stringent emission reductions …clearly indicated as needed,” according to the UN’s climate change secretariat.
By Alex Froley | November 25, 2011 08:05 AM Comments (0)
European nations scrambling to secure their gas supplies have made some big advances in recent weeks. The UK’s largest household gas supplier, Centrica, signed on November 21 a $20 billion, 10-year gas supply deal for imports from Norway’s Statoil.
Meanwhile, political leaders from Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands gathered in the German coastal city of Lubmin November 8 to celebrate the inauguration of the first line of the Nord Stream project.
By Alessandro Vitelli | August 3, 2011 01:46 AM Comments (0)
The Australian LNG industry’s protestations that the federal government’s planned carbon tax will put it at a competitive disadvantage to other exporters such as Qatar, Malaysia and Indonesia are starting to ring a little hollow.
There’s no denying that a carbon tax is an impost that Australia’s regional competitors will not have to bear, but the prospect is clearly not putting the brakes on investment in what has been a booming LNG sector based on conventional and unconventional gas resources on both sides of the country.
By News Desk | June 27, 2011 09:17 AM Comments (0)
In this week’s Regulation & The Environment column from Platts Oilgram News, former Platts editor Gerald Karey, who was at the Kyoto talks back in the 90s, discusses the fact that the Kyoto treaty, the benchmark standard for emissions control, may expire without a replacement.
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