The lower gas prices Americans have been enjoying for the past several months were supposed to boost consumer spending and get the ball rolling on more robust economic growth. That didn’t happen, and a new survey has a revealing insight as to why.
About two-thirds of worldwide methanol production comes from natural gas, something the U.S. has in abundance at the moment. Methanol can even be made from coal, another feedstock that’s bountiful in the U.S.
A ruptured pipeline in Goleta leaked an estimated 21,000 gallons of crude oil Tuesday, some of which flowed into the ocean off Santa Barbara County, authorities said.
In a rare ground attack deep into Syria, U.S. Army commandos killed a man described as the Islamic State’s head of oil operations, captured his wife and rescued a woman whom American officials said was enslaved.
Natural gas futures advanced for a third straight week, the longest such streak since June, on speculation that unusually warm U.S. weather in late May will stoke demand for the power-plant fuel.
Shell Oil president Marvin Odum said: “These are potentially very large resources, but resources that would come online 10, 15, 20 years from now. So the current oil price is actually somewhat irrelevant. The size of the resource is what’s important.”
The state’s oil and gas agency has missed the deadline for reporting on the use of water by oil producers in California, saying that the large volume of information required could not be processed in time.
After slashing the number of drilling rigs for months, U.S. shale-oil companies say they are ready to bring rigs back into service, setting up the first big test of their ability to quickly react to rising crude prices.
Saudi Arabia says its strategy of squeezing high-cost rivals such as US shale producers is succeeding, as the world’s largest crude exporter seeks to reassert itself as the dominant force in the global oil market.
Pumping more gasoline into your car than the tank can supposedly hold would be quite disconcerting. Yet with electric cars, the idea of supplying more energy than your battery’s capacity is an entirely normal scenario—one that you should get used to.
