Foreign Policy Blogs

Energy

Baghdad’s Oil Payment Deal with Kurds Helps Boost Exports

Baghdad’s Oil Payment Deal with Kurds Helps Boost Exports

Iraq’s oil minister Abdul Kareem Luaiby anticipates his country’s exports for September to exceed 2.6 million barrels a day, a figure not reached in the last 20 or so years. Part of this increase stems from a deal cut between the central government and the Kurdish autonomous region. The Kurds had stopped exporting oil back […]

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Thoughts on Japan’s First Post-Fukushima Energy Policy

Thoughts on Japan’s First Post-Fukushima Energy Policy

  Japan is reversing its decades-long advocacy of nuclear power as Bloomberg reported last Friday. In its first post-Fukushima energy policy approved by Prime Minister Noda a cabinet panel endorsed and outlined the potential next steps to phase out nuclear power plants by 2040. In general, that is in line with Japanese public opinion. A report […]

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Scottish Government Unveils Plans for World’s Largest Wind Farm

Scottish Government Unveils Plans for World’s Largest Wind Farm

As August ended, the Scottish government unveiled plans for the world’s largest wind farm in the Moray Firth, in the country’s far northeast. The government plans to spend £4.5 billion to erect 339 wind turbines off shore which would generate 1,500 MW, about the same as a conventional power plant. This is part of the […]

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Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions in Light of the UAE – Australia Uranium Deal

Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions in Light of the UAE – Australia Uranium Deal

Only in December 2011 did Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ruling Labor Party vote to overturn a long-standing ban on Australian uranium exports to India in order to strengthen diplomatic ties between those two countries, thus elevating the relationship to a more strategic level while boosting Australia’s resources-dominated economy. Australia, holder of the world’s biggest known […]

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Warm Sea Water Forces Reactor Shut Down

Warm Sea Water Forces Reactor Shut Down

  The consensus about Fukushima’s nuclear disaster holds that human error caused the partial meltdown. Failure to anticipate what went wrong is at the heart of the matter. Over the weekend, a reactor at the the Millstone nuclear power plant in Waterford, Conn., closed down because its designers back in the 1960s failed to anticipate […]

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Indian Blackout Lesson: Invest in Infrastructure

Indian Blackout Lesson: Invest in Infrastructure

A couple of days ago, over 600 million people (that’s not a typo, six hundred million – 600,000,000) lost electrical power when three electricity grids in India collapsed. The cause was simple, demand outstripped supply, and the mechanisms in place to manage the imbalance were just not up to the job. This is not just […]

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China is Back in Town! Observations on the CNOOC-NEXEN Takeover Bid

China is Back in Town! Observations on the CNOOC-NEXEN Takeover Bid

Back in 2005, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) tabled a huge $18.5 billion offer for the American oil company Unocal. Despite the logic of strategically buying up Unocal for its Central Asian prospects, improving its Shale gas infrastructure and the tempting ‘all-cash’ nature of the buyout, the deal ultimately floundered on the banks […]

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Interview on the Geopolitics of Oil

Interview on the Geopolitics of Oil

I would like to point readers interested in the geopolitics of oil to a very interesting interview the Oilprice.com’s geopolitical editor Daniel J. Graeber gave to Infowars.com yesterday evening. Among the topics discussed, I would especially like to draw your attention to the following: How do the tensions in the Middle East impact oil prices? How to […]

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Megatons to Megawatts is 90% Complete

Megatons to Megawatts is 90% Complete

One of the greatest problems in the post-Cold War era has been what to do with the leftover highly enriched uranium [HEU], also known as weapons-grade uranium. When the US and USSR were engaged in the nuclear arms race, tons of the stuff was produced in the hopes it would never be used. The 1993 […]

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The Bright Future of Floating LNG Liquefaction, Regasification and Storage Units

The Bright Future of Floating LNG Liquefaction, Regasification and Storage Units

Shanghai-based Wison Offshore & Marine Ltd. announced on June 1, 2012 that it had been awarded a contract by the Exmar Group for the engineering, procurement, construction, installation and commissioning of the world’s first Floating LNG Liquefaction, Regasification and Storage Unit (FLRSU), according to gCaptain.com. The facility will be used by Exmar and located on the […]

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Falling Oil Prices Present a Great Opportunity – An Interview with Jim Rogers

Falling Oil Prices Present a Great Opportunity – An Interview with Jim Rogers

By James Stafford World markets appear to be hovering over a precipice as Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, slowdowns in India and China and further bank downgrades threaten to send stocks and commodities down even further. Falling oil and gas prices may offer some respite to consumers but are they enough to help the economy or […]

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Some Basics on Fracking to Join the Informed Discussion

Some Basics on Fracking to Join the Informed Discussion

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has drawn a ban in New York City’s watershed, and the New Jersey legislature is contemplating to prevent the transport of wastewater from fracking through the Garden State. What do we need to know about “fracking” to join an informed discussion? In general, all natural gas wells have their highest production rates once brought […]

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Alberta’s New Energy Minister on the Keystone XL Pipeline

Alberta’s New Energy Minister on the Keystone XL Pipeline

The following was posted in The Kensington Review, which interviewed by email Ken Hughes, the newly appointed Energy Minister in the Canadian Province of Alberta. We are grateful to the minister for his time, and to the staff in the provincial government who assisted in this effort, especially Bob McManus and Bart Johnson. Kensington: Just how […]

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What Countries Should Fear U.S. Natural Gas Exports in the Future?

What Countries Should Fear U.S. Natural Gas Exports in the Future?

The world gas market is currently dominated by gas exporting behemoths like Qatar, Russia, Algeria, and Iran. Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel–compared to coal and oil–and therefore encourages an increase in power plants that run on natural gas. Many coal-fired power plants in the U.S. are being retrofitted right now because of the abundance […]

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Japan’s Noda Backs Restarting Two Reactors

Japan’s Noda Backs Restarting Two Reactors

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has announced his decision to restart two nuclear reactors in western Japan. As I noted in this blog a month ago, all of Japan’s nuclear reactors are offline. Before the Fukushima meltdown, 30% of the nation’s electricity came from uranium fission reactors. As a result of these shutdowns, there is […]

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