Recently, I had a long talk with Ali Moshiri, President of Chevron Africa and Latin America Exploration and Production Company. Mr. Moshiri has been working for Chevron for over 30 years. He’s one busy man, whose responsibilities begin in the southern waters of the Gulf of Mexico and extend to the cold reaches of the southern Atlantic Ocean.
[Read more...]How to Look for a Job
August 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Unemployment is stuck in a rut. One reason is the tendency to look backwards. Trillions of dollars have been spent (with no end in sight) to bail out financial institutions, homebuilders, and failing industries. The federal government is spending $787 billion on a rejuvenation plan: ARRA – the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In the bill, $500 million is sequestered to metamorphose former credit-default swap salesmen into nurses and public health workers. Assuming the government wastes half of that money filling a new bureaucracy to administer the training, that still will be a lot of new nurses.
[Read more...]The Brighter Side of the BP Oil Spill
August 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Yes, you can think of the BP well blowout as the end of the road if you want to – if not the end of the world. Or you can look at how this will change the energy landscape in general, and the oil industry in particular. And then you can get out in front of it, and act and invest accordingly.
[Read more...]The Next Big Emerging Markets?
August 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment
When countries get grouped together for economic or political purposes, an acronym or other shorthand device is soon to follow. OPEC, EU and G7 are a few of the old standards, while G20, PIIGS (European nations with dangerously large sovereign debt burdens), and of course BRICs are newer examples.
[Read more...]The Namibian Oil Rush
July 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
While BP has been busy spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, many other oil companies have been busy finding oil under the waters of other gulfs, seas and oceans. In fact, Brazil’s state-controlled energy giant, Petrobras (NYSE:PBR), just announced a major oil discovery in offshore Angolan waters. Water depth is about 1,500 feet. The “net pay� zone is almost 1,500 feet of oil-bearing reservoir, far below the seabed. The preliminary estimate is that there are over 500 million barrels or recoverable oil in place. That’ll likely grow, as additional wells go down over time. It’s always nice to strike oil.
[Read more...]Green Jobs from the Government Not Gonna Happen
July 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
“Green Jobs Don’t Exist in a Free Market� was the headline for Tom DeWeese, writing at NewsWithViews.com, which is exactly right; the only jobs that exist in a free market are those supplying real demand for, as an example, hamburgers, pizza, fried chicken and tacos, which has resulted in fast-food restaurants supplying them to be located on, seemingly, every other block in the Whole Freaking Country (WFC).
[Read more...]Chinese Energy Consumption Surges Forward
July 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment
China is now the largest energy user in the world, the International Energy Agency announced this week. The country consumed 2.252 billion tons of “oil equivalent� last year. The US – formerly the largest – managed to burn just 2.17 billion tons.
So it goes… Another inevitable milestone of Asian growth and Western decline. Like most facets of this takeover, the changing of the guard has been swift:
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Nuclear Power: The King of All Energies
Nuclear will give you, by far, the most energy for your money right now.
The best way to view this issue is in terms of what physicists call ‘energy density.’ That is, let’s measure the amount of energy stored in a given volume or mass of a certain substance or material.
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