Sunday, August 21, 2005

Chronicle remembers that Houston is the oil capitol of the world

Today's business section was an interesting change from the usual pablum. I was actually useful information to those of us that actually work in the oil industry. I was actually floored! First we have a big print above the fold headline that Indonesia is about to become a net importer of petroleum products, not because they are running out, but because they have not made the needed investment in infrastructure to make the wells they have optimised, nor have they invested the time and energy (and money) in finding and developing new fields. Of course they had to point out that indonesia isn't taxing oil use to starve usage. The same thing could be couched as saying that Indonesia has decided that economic prosperity is more important than restricting the use of oil to save it for export. This IS the chronicle after all. As a result they are about to be kicked out of OPEC. Then we move on to how the feds in charge of investigating environmental crimes are investigating the BP Texas City explosion, then we move on to the obligatory tree hugger nonsense (this is the Houston Comical after all) about how mean old big oil is going to destroy snail darter habitat in it's efforts to feed the oil monkey. then we read about a huge new find in the northern reaches of the norwegian sector of the North Sea discovered by Norsk Hydro. Congrats to NH! I'd much rather send my money to Norway than to Saudi. The Norwegians at least know how to party, and they don't bundle thier women up to the point that they look like shapeless masses of cloth either, which makes partying with them that much more fun. Then we move on to "The Well" where we learn that Chevron's Tahiti test well exceeded expectations, Kerr-McGee won the bidding for a whole passle of new west GOM deep water leases, and J. Ray McDermott got a big Saudi Aramco contract. On the whole, not bad business reporting for the oil capitol of the world.

1 Comments:

Blogger Pigilito said...

From the Norway article: "Norway, the world's third-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia and Russia".

I had no idea. I would have thought one of the Gulf states, or perhaps Mexico.

Life must be good in Norway at the moment.

August 23, 2005 6:29 AM  

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