Category: Chemical

March 30, 2020

The U.S. is all but guaranteed to lose its hard-earned spot as the world’s number one oil producer this year amid the recent price crash, vanishing demand and a plunge in capital investment, energy experts say. That could mean potentially […]

March 16, 2020

The global economy needs power to enable it to function. For a century, the cheapest, most efficient way to do that was to burn fossil fuels to produce steam to turn a turbine. But not any more. The dominance of […]

February 24, 2020

A new report from Enverus (formerly Drillinginfo) tells a now-familiar story for U.S. producers drilling for oil and gas in basins outside of the Permian: A focus on cutting costs, increasing efficiencies and prioritizing drilling for oil over natural gas. […]

February 21, 2020

The global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market continued to evolve in 2019 with demand increasing for LNG and natural gas in power and non-power sectors, reports Shell’s latest annual LNG Outlook published this week. Global demand for LNG grew by […]

February 19, 2020

A major cyberattack has hit a gas compression facility, forcing it to shut it down for two days as it struggled to recover, according to an alert from the U.S. government. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) said it had […]

February 12, 2020

The goal of U.S. “Energy Independence” continues to be pushed across the spectrum. It rests on lowering oil imports, seen as a bugaboo for us since the crisis of the 1970s. And on the surface, this makes sense. In the […]

February 12, 2020

1. How big is the US coal industry, and what is its growth trajectory? US coal employment peaked in the 1920s and the whole sector (mining, transport, and power plants) currently supports about 174,000 jobs. In 2018, US mines produced […]

January 28, 2020

“Renewable power sources are reducing the need for large and efficient high-power generators,” said Wilmer Zhou, Senior Analyst, Manufacturing Technology, at IHS Markit Technology. “However, renewable power sources are not reliable for constant power generation. Because of this, they require […]

January 23, 2020

As the tiny nation of Guyana sends off its first tanker full of crude, the world welcomes a newcomer to the ranks of high volume oil producers. With fresh discoveries this month off small nearby countries, this small stretch of […]

January 14, 2020

When it comes to the future sustainability (excuse the pun) of oil companies, there are two trains of thought, one of which is that they should ‘stick to their knitting’ and just focus on what they are good at, which […]

January 13, 2020

2019 may have been the year clean energy irreversibly turned a corner toward dominance in the United States. After all, who could have foreseen last January that America would realize existing coal can’t compete against new renewables, see new solar-plus-storage […]

January 13, 2020

Forty years ago, the conventional wisdom about oil was that we were running out of it and needed to find ways to conserve. Twenty years ago, it was faddish for people in the oil business to talk about the then-assumed […]

January 7, 2020

As crude prices react to escalating tensions between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, now is an important time to understand the key distinction between energy “independence” and energy “security” as the terms apply to the U.S. […]

January 6, 2020

The giving season is over for most Americans. And some Democratic senators think it must also end for coal: They want a congressional watchdog agency to look into whether a $1 billion subsidy to chemically-cleanse coal is paying off. The […]

December 26, 2019

December 20th marks a historic milestone for Guyana, the small South American country that is soon to become the fastest growing economy in the Caribbean. Late in the evening, ExxonMobil and its partners announced that it had produced the first […]