By Bridget Hunsucker | March 29, 2013 06:16 PM Comments (0)
Two trains carrying crude oil derailed in the US this month, making headlines that garnered more attention to a recent debate over the in-vogue shipping method’s environmental impact.
The popularity of crude by rail shipments has opponents of major proposed crude pipeline projects (like Transcanada’s Keystone XL) asking the question: is rail transport safe?
By News Desk | December 17, 2012 08:56 AM Comments (0)
Increasingly in Texas, the oil man and the farmer are definitely not friends. Local battles over pipeline construction and rights of way are increasingly finding their way into the courts. In this week’s Oilgram News column, Regulation & The Environment, Leslie Moore Mira spells out some of the issues.
By News Desk | November 5, 2012 08:43 AM Comments (0)
As projections for US production of crude continue to far outstrip the capacity and location of the existing US crude oil pipeline system, and some natural gas carriers finding far less demand for their services, turning one into another seems to be the obvious choice. In this week’s Oilgram News column At the Wellhead, Bridget Hunsucker looks at some of the changes now under scrutiny.
By John Kingston | September 12, 2012 09:30 AM Comments (1)
Big pipeline projects tend to get announced with much fanfare. That’s not the case for Energy Transfer Partners, which is seeking to add one more north-to-south crude oil pipeline to drain the upper Midwest and Canada of its excess crude oil.
As reporting by Platts Meghan Gordon revealed, ETP has petitioned the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to allow it to make changes to its giant Trunkline natural gas line, which now runs south-to-north, into the upper Midwest. (You can see a map of the line on ETP’s webpage here.) For Trunkline to cut natural gas service to places like Michigan, FERC would need to permit it. Some of the affected states are protesting the move in front of FERC.
But the FERC move revealed the ETP plans in an indirect way, and it appears ETP otherwise doesn’t want to talk about its project, as Meghan reveals in her reporting. The company has put out no press release on it; its media people won’t talk about it. Outside of the FERC filing, there are no public declarations about the plans anywhere.
By John Roberts | September 11, 2012 06:47 AM Comments (0)
There’s no doubt that in laying down the Nordstream line, Russia has proved its critics wrong. It has laid a pair of 48-inch 1,224-km pipelines through minefields political and literal, tackling the environmental concerns of at least some of the Baltic states on the one hand, and carrying out long-overdue mine clearance of World War II debris on the other.
In doing this, it has achieved a major objective, reducing its dependence on what it considers to be dubious transit states, notably Ukraine and Belarus. It has also freed itself, should it so choose, of reliance on using Poland as a gas transit route.
So, at a cost estimated at anything from $5billion to $15 billion, Russia has given itself considerable room for manuever in terms of how it gets its gas to market.
But just what is the price of this achievement…and who will pay it?
By News Desk | July 9, 2012 11:33 AM Comments (0)
It seems that no matter where strife develops in the world, there’s always some suggestion that oil may be playing a part. And though it may seem far-fetched to some, the petroleum aspect has been whispered as a possible backdrop to some of what’s going on in Syria.
In this week’s PetroDollars column from Platts Oilgram News, Kate Dourian looks at the history of Syria as a possible oil pipeline route, and whether it has a role in the current violence.
By John Roberts | July 5, 2012 11:56 AM Comments (0)
Nabucco is dead; Long Live Nabucco!
It sometimes seems as if the whole saga of the EU’s pet project to develop a Southern Gas Corridor is contained in that paradox. As a result of Nabucco’s prominence, not least in the minds of European politicians, it is as if everything to do with carrying Caspian gas to Europe is seen through the prism of the ten-year-old effort to develop the Nabucco pipeline.
So when two of the principal parties involved, Azerbaijan and Turkey, announce they are going to build a different line, the cry goes up: ‘Nabucco is dead!’
By Meghan Gordon | June 27, 2012 06:25 PM Comments (0)
By Rodney White | June 6, 2012 12:41 PM Comments (0)
While it may be heretical to say in some quarters, Ken Costello asserts that there can be too much pipeline safety, especially for those gas systems operated by local distribution companies.
By John Kingston | May 22, 2012 05:55 PM Comments (0)
Genscape, a company whose many activities include flying around Cushing, Oklahoma and figuring out from the sky how much oil is in the ocean of storage tanks there, has been taking a look at the Seaway Pipeline.
In a webinar held Tuesday morning, Genscape’s Abudi Zein (full disclosure: a former Platts colleague) reviewed some of the many pictures his company has taken from the air or from satellite imagery over the 800 kilometers of the just-reversed Seaway Pipeline between Cushing and Freeport, Texas.
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