October's oil production numbers show an increase

The recent increase in Chinese imports of oil, (they imported 20 million tonnes of crude (the equivalent of 4.7 mbd) in December, is bein...

The Avatar movie and the mining of oil sands

The movie Avatar gets the mining bit wrong. And not by just a little – but then us villains are rarely understood, so what should we expe...

The CIA, Climate Change, and the Booker and Plimer books

Thanks to Bruce Everett I gather that just when there are concerns about how well we are handling the war on terror, the CIA is being dive...

Gas demand, miles travelled and salt for the roads

It has been a while since we looked at the TWIP and natural gas pages of the EIA, so (in order to maintain the historic record) a quick tri...

One impact of the cold spell

It was, perhaps, an unscripted comment but I was watching the “ABC News” with Diane Sawyer tonight, and after the story of the intense cold ...

Power Shortages, then and now

Today I’d like to chat, for just a minute, about the reliability of power supply, given the bitter cold that is covering both the United Sta...

More on refining

Last week I pointed out that the crude oil that comes out of the ground is not made up of a single hydrocarbon, but rather is a mix of diffe...