Oil Watchdog

Exxon is still fumbling to deal with a 42,000-gallon oil pipeline spill on the Yellowstone River west of Billings, Montana. Its initial response was pathetic–it was slow to turn off the gushing pipeline, had no plan for dealing with a spill in high water (i.e. every spring) and, most alarmingly, “misspoke” about how deeply the [...]

The surge in energy company drilling for deep-rock natural gas has generated a matching surge in complaints of water contamination, including faucets pouring out so much methane gas that you can light it (video) with a match. The drillers, which include Exxon and other major energy operators, long denied the contamination had anything to do [...]

The financial news today is that oil prices are down below $90 a barrel from over $100, and futures market prices for gasoline are down 5% to below $3.00 a gallon. Will that translate to big savings at the pump? Don’t bet on it, at least not for long. OilWatchdog has watched for years as [...]

U.S. gas prices have hit their highest level ever for springtime, at $3.96 a gallon for regular on average. Yep, higher even than the record surge in 2008, as oil companies reap near-record profits. So what does that have to do with the price of silver? The speculative price of silver is dropping, maybe crashing, [...]

Chevron’s army of lawyers isn’t its only weapon in staving off the demand of Ecuadoran peasants that the company clean up its toxic drilling mess in the Amazon. Chevron is also happy to use deception, secret video and dirty tricksters. The problem with tricksters, however, is that it can be hard to keep them in the fold, and they can be so darned greedy. Consider the tale of secret videotaper Diego Borja, and the “expense money”of at least $169,000 that Chevron has heaped on him since August 2009.

The price of gasoline is up a dollar in the last year to $3.83 a gallon nationally. Good time to see a strange, funny, disturbing documentary called “Gashole” about how this happens. Who knew that Congressional hearings featuring oil company CEOS could be simultaneously hilarious and horrifiying? Or that “Reefer Madness” provides a clue to how oil companies distract us from the real issues?

Oil companies are making a fortune off of drivers with oil at $109 a barrel (which comes to $2.60 a gallon at 42 gallons per barrel). But they’re getting rich a second time refining the oil into gasoline.

Monday’s jump in oil prices to more than $108 a barrel, with the price of gasoline above $3.66 a gallon for regular ($4.06 in California), triggered a flood of news stories. But the dry, just-the-facts lead of the Bloomberg story caught my eye because one prediction driving speculation will crumble if the speculators win: Crude [...]

I remember days and nights spent at a rewrite desk in Washington 25 years ago, taking in and editing nearly unbelievable information from reporters in Russia and Western Europe. Where was this place, Chernobyl? Was the meltdown first, or the explosion? Was radiation really spreading across Europe? Do we have a stringer in Norway? How [...]

The U.S. is fiddling on nuclear reactor safety while Japan burns. The worst threat in Japan now comes from spent nuclear fuel stored in poorly protected water pools–just like in the United States.

With perhaps ten thousand lives lost and a nuclear reactor emergency growing daily in Japan, one industry is poised to reap huge profits from tragedy. The stocks of oil refiners charged upward today on bets that Japan would soon have to import a lot more heating oil and gasoline because of refinery fires and quake/tsunami [...]

Japan’s struggle to avoid full-on meltdown at nuclear reactors that lost cooling power after the quake. The shutdown of major Japanese oil refineries. Both raise questions that scream for answers about corporate and government behavior. Japan’s nuclear plants closest to the 8.9 quake and tsunami seem to be destabilizing fast. The best the nation’s nuclear [...]

The federal agency that tracks energy prices is predicting record annual gasoline prices for 2011–$3.56 per gallon on average for the full year,  higher than the economy-wrecking $3.35 per gallon average price of 2008.  The prediction should cause some neck-whipping at the White House and Federal Reserve. It might even get energy and financial regulators [...]