US President Barack Obama is navigating largely the same entrenched Israeli-Palestinian tensions as his predecessors have since the advent of shuttle diplomacy four decades ago. But Obama has one essential difference from the past—a local natural gas boom that is making petro-states out of the region’s traditional hydrocarbon have-nots.
Big Oil—which missed the opening rounds of the shale gas boom and has since paid a high price to get in–is again absent in a game-changing bonanza. This time it is East Africa, where risk-taking smaller players are the pioneers, and the super-majors are scrambling to join the rush.
ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY, Illinois—President Barack Obama today announced a new deal for fossil fuels. But the place he chose to make it spoke the loudest. It was not an oilfield, but the country’s premier center for the study of advanced batteries.
African corruption, while still incredibly high, may be dropping.
Three of the most volatile parts of the Middle East—Iran, Iraq and Israel—are the scene of oil and gas initiatives that could shake up geopolitics there and beyond. The efforts center on three energy pipelines, at least two of which seem likely to be built.
Nassim Taleb—author of The Black Swan—won yet another round in the debate over the probability of highly improbable events. A new US regulator’s report reveals that Boeing regarded the chances of a battery fire aboard its new 787 Dreamliner as less than one in a billion hours of flight time. Instead, the lithium-ion battery caught fire aboard one aircraft and started smoking on another—in less than 52,000 hours of flight time. The report (pdf) was issued March 7 by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Pollution has become the Chinese public’s No. 1 political grievance, eclipsing bitter anger over corruption and land grabs, an official said. Concerns about the environment have captured an unusual degree of attention among officials at the two-week National People’s Congress under way now in Beijing. The Congress officially marks the transition to Xi Jinping as China’s new president and Li Keqiang as prime minister.
With a bold, sometimes ribald and buffoonish style, all of it aimed at the poorest of Venezuela’s population, Hugo Chávez cast an outsized shadow over his region’s politics. But all of it would have been impossible absent the potency of petroleum—Venezuela’s possession of the world’s largest reserves of crude oil.
This item has been updated.
Shell’s decision to wait out the year before resuming drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic waters reflects a conflicted industry. Tantalized by the grandest hydrocarbon bonanza anywhere on the planet, oil majors have snapped up exploration and drilling opportunities in the US, Greenland and Russia. Yet they are moving gingerly, mindful of risks of a scale that, in the case of a catastrophic accident, could destroy a company while damaging the pristine Arctic.
Elon Musk has announced a new public relations strategy after losing $100 million in sales because of a New York Times critique of his sexy Model S. The campaign is meant to becalm motorists and recover from a 13% plunge in Tesla shares since the Feb. 8 story, which Musk bitterly assails as personal and mean-spirited.
The long-ruling Castro brothers have plucked a bureaucrat from obscurity as their heir-apparent to rule Cuba, and named 2018 as the year of the transition. The country’s new president will be Miguel Diaz-Canel, a 52-year-old life-long party official little known outside the country.
Over the last year, we have witnessed a remarkable blood-letting in China, in which a series of much-powerful officials have been brought low by criminal claims including alleged murder and theft. The outbreak of equal justice is not new for China—the post-Deng period has been marked by the occasional jailing of the powerful.
Chinese firms are buying control of a string of struggling US electric-car and battery makers—tarnished trophies of America’s exuberant but so far disappointing foray into the industry. But while critics assert that the Chinese shopping spree reveals the failures of US energy policy, it actually says more about how some of the world’s biggest fortunes of the last three decades have been earned: namely, thanks to a sharp eye for an unrecognized bargain.
A bit of media attention has been drawn to ExxonMobil’s hiring of some of America’s most seasoned foreign policy hands as advisers abroad, including to help it through a fix in Iraq. As reported first by the Iraq Oil Report (paywall), most prominent on the list are former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and former ambassador James Jeffrey.
President Barack Obama pushed Congress passionately for gun control. He urged reason in the search for a bipartisan fiscal agreement. But on climate change, he delivered an express threat—either Congress would take action to reduce emissions, or he would do so by fiat.
Italy launched its second corruption case amid the country’s parliamentary elections, arresting the CEO of state-controlled defense company Finmeccanica, which once held a contract to build the helicopter for the US president. Today’s arrest of Giusseppe Orsi underscores the stakes in two of the world’s most competitive businesses–defense and oil–in which political connections and bribery are staples of the dealmaking tradecraft.
A new research study has found a significant increase in toxic pollution during fireworks displays, backing up a decision by Beijing authorities to encourage a muted barrage for the Chinese New Year. (State media Xinhua says fireworks sales before Sunday’s celebration were 37% lower than last year.)
About two weeks ago, spaceship-and-electric car-maker Elon Musk (pictured above) got in touch with Boeing, whose 787 Dreamliners are grounded because of smoke and fire problems with their powerful lithium-iron batteries. His team had figured out how to tightly pack such batteries into both space-going and earthly vehicles. He was happy to pass along lessons learned. Boeing replied that the situation is “under control,” Musk said.
Infrastructure is a basic part of China’s economic-led foreign policy—around the world, it builds roads and buildings as part of deals to mine, drill and build energy pipelines. But in neighboring Myanmar, it is taking on the unaccustomed role of attempting to end a war—the country’s 17-year conflict with Kachin rebels on the Chinese border.
Boeing says it wants to conduct flights of the 787 Dreamliner in order to determine why fire and smoke broke out aboard two of the aircraft last month. While commercial airlines are starting to tally their losses resulting from the 787’s grounding, the US Federal Aviation Administration is considering the Boeing request to conduct the flights with no passengers aboard.
Pirates this weekend seized a French-owned oil tanker off the coast of Ivory Coast, capturing 17 crew members. It is the latest attack in West Africa, a new locus of ocean-bound piracy.
When Tehran says it might join talks over its nuclear program later this month, it appears to be addressing the Iranian people as much as the international community: With presidential elections five months away, Iranian leaders want to avoid antagonizing voters who, while fiercely nationalistic, are also reeling from economic sanctions.
Steven Chu, who resigned today as US energy secretary, may eventually be seen as the most consequential person to hold the post since it was created in the 1970s. While caught up today as a piñata in Washington’s often-malevolent politics, Chu set out in 2009 with a couple of ambitions, one of which was to put the US on course for a new economic revival, led by energy technology. If that future comes about, Chu may end up credited for a large role in making it happen.
