Oil Price Slump Affects Alaska State Budgets

From the wire services, courtesy of Upstream Online:
Sliding oil prices and production have prompted Alaska officials to forecast a state budget shortfall of $1.25 billion in the next fiscal year instead of the surplus they predicted just two months ago.
The dramatic change in state fortunes poses a stiff challenge for Governor Sarah Palin, whose record [...]

Read Full Post »

Legal Solution to Arctic Sovreignty Claims?

From Upstream Online:
The battle for the Arctic’s vast reserves of oil and gas can only be decided by international law, Russia and Denmark declared after talks today.

Five countries with an Arctic coastline – Russia, the US, Canada, Norway and Denmark through its control of Greenland – have competing claims to the region.
Russia said [...]

Read Full Post »

Crude Oil Prices – February 2009

From Reuters:
It kind of looks like prices may have bottomed out.
The OPEC basket price graph is similar:
We’re basically back to 2003-2004 prices for crude oil.  A look at historical prices is interesting.  From BP’s 2007 World Energy Review comes the following graph (my apologies if the text is too small to read easily):
The price swings [...]

Read Full Post »

Arctic Melting Could Help Shippers & Oil Companies

From Alexander’s Gas & Oil (Renee Schoof):
With global warming melting the Arctic’s eons-old ice at an alarming rate, shipping and oil companies are looking ahead at how to exploit the new open waters. For the past 30 years, the summer Arctic icepack has been shrinking. In 2007, the melt reached record levels. This past summer, [...]

Read Full Post »

Cheap oil slows race to tap Arctic supplies

From Upstream Online:
The collapse of oil prices has slowed efforts to tap vast crude oil and natural gas supplies that lie under the Arctic Ocean but countries like Russia, Canada and Norway are still vying for a potential bounty of energy riches trapped there.  The potential payoff is huge, the US Geological Survey estimates that [...]

Read Full Post »

Alaska Oil Production

A nice little graph, from Kevin Banks (ADNR) presentation to the Alaska Legislature.
Bottom line – Prudhoe Bay (PBU) was, and is, the major oil source for Alaska and it’s declining.  The rate of decline can be slowed by improved by technology, but there are no new elephant fields to take its place.  Alaska’s oil gravy [...]

Read Full Post »

ExxonMobil Releases Point Thompson Leases

From the State of Alaska website:
February 19, 2009, Juneau, Alaska – Governor Sarah Palin today noted the ongoing progress the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) continues to make toward its goal of resolving the legal disputes over the Point Thomson area. Earlier this week, ExxonMobil surrendered eight leases in the Point Thomson area, comprising about [...]

Read Full Post »