US House Votes for Quadrupling of Per-Barrel Oil Tax

The US House of Representatives on Friday voted to more than quadruple a per-barrel oil tax that fills a special trust fund to pay for damages from major spills like the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

The measure called for raising the eight-cent-per-barrel tax to 34 cents, raising nearly 12 billion dollars over 10 years for the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which currently holds about 1.5 billion dollars.

The legislation, which passed by a 215-204 margin, also aimed to raise the cap on per-incident trust fund expenditures from one billion dollars to five billion dollars.'

Read more...

Another Oil Rig Overturns on Gulf Coast

A second oil drilling rig has overturned near Morgan City, Louisiana, after the oil slick from the first accident in the Gulf of Mexico washed ashore.

No injuries have been reported. The overturned rig is unrelated to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that threatens the coast's fragile ecosystem.

US Coast Guard officials are currently investigating reports as fishermen in coastal towns fear for their livelihood.'

Read more...

Very suspicious, makes you think someone doesnt want to find oil there!

Iran Discovers Vast New Oil Reserves

Iran has discovered more than 8.8 billion barrels of oil in four layers of reserves in the country's southwestern Susangerd oil field.

"These reserves were discovered after drilling through all the new layers of reserves, to a depth of 5,026 meters (16,489.5 ft), and the expected and possible amount of reserves in this field is over 8.83 billion barrels," Iran's Oil Minister Gholam-Hossein Nozari said in a statement on Monday.

Read more...

Iran Discovers New Oil, Gas Fields

Iran has discovered a new oil layer and a gas field in locations in the center and southwest of the country, says the Iranian Oil Minister.
The new oil layer forms part of the Band-e-Karkheh oil field northwest of Ahvaz, capital of Iran’s oil-rich southwestern province of Khuzestan, said Gholam-Hossein Nozari on Saturday, on the sidelines of the International Oil, Gas and Petrochemistry Exhibition in Tehran. Nozari said that the oil field’s estimated reserves increased to 4.5 billion barrels with the discovery of the new layer.

Read more...

Iraq Parliament Promises to Push Shell Out of Gas Deal

Expectations that foreign companies will cash in on Iraqi oil riches were called into question tonight after a key parliamentary body in Baghdad pledged to "push Shell out" and halt a forthcoming licensing round.

The warning from Jabir Khalifa Jabir, secretary of the Iraqi parliament's oil and gas committee, was seen by financial analysts as a serious threat to western investment opportunities in a country that holds the second-largest oil reserves in the world.

Shell has been considered a frontrunner in the race to seize control of the Iraqi energy sector after signing a $4bn deal to process and market gas from the south of the country and ship it, possibly to Britain as liquefied natural gas (LNG).

But the preliminary agreement – and a subsequent one with China National Petroleum Corporation – were unconstitutional and detrimental to Iraq's economic interests, said Jabir, who worked for more than 15 years at Iraq's state-run Southern Gas Company.

Read more...

Just watch the security situation in Iraq deteriorate significantly now!