By Steve Hargreaves, senior writer,
CNN Money
NEW YORK ~ Don't panic, the world has plenty of oil to cover any loss in Libyan production. That's the message the head of the International Energy Agency, the group formed to protect against global energy supply disruptions, sent the market on Tuesday.
"We have strategic stockpiles of 1.6 billion barrels and I know that OPEC has a good spare capacity," IEA chief Nabuo Tanaka told reporters at an OPEC oil ministers meeting in Saudi Arabia.
Gauging the market reaction, it appears Tanaka's message has fallen on deaf ears.
[North Sea]
Oil reserves higher than previously thought
SNP News
A report by leading industry body, Oil and Gas UK, has found that North Sea oil and gas reserves are higher than previously thought.
Commenting, Mike Weir MP, the SNP's Westminster Energy spokesperson, said that future revenues from oil should be invested for Scotland's future.
Mr Weir warned that the lessons of the 1970s, where London politicians claimed the reserves would not last long and made the case for the establishment of an oil fund to secure the benefits of oil revenues for future generations.
Will India emerge energy powerhouse via shale gas?
By Bill Holland and Samantha Santa-Maria,
Economic Times
India’s first natural gas well targeted at shale has been drilled by ONGC and the whisper numbers are already in. The well was a success and geologists and engineers are already pegging the country’s resources at somewhere between 600 and 2,000 trillion cu ft (tcf) of potential gas. That is equal to about two centuries’ worth of gas at the country’s current consumption rate. Platts has been covering the shale ‘revolution’ for more than five years in the US.
If India’s experience parallels that of the US, a few things would happen quickly in the next five years. The first is psychological: like the US, India would transform its ‘gas state of mind’ from thinking that it is chronically short of natural gas resources to seeing itself as a natural gas powerhouse. The first part of this change will most likely be seen in the estimates of India’s natural gas resources, just as occurred in the US. In 2007, Platts editors were sitting in a conference room in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hotel when Terry Engelder, a Pennsylvania State University professor and the socalled ‘father’ of the Marcellus Shale field — now thought to be the world’s second-largest gas basin behind Iran’s Pars field — surprised everyone.
He said that after looking at early drilling results from independent producers, he was going to change his estimate of the field’s gas in place. Dr Engelder, who spent his career studying the geology of the Marcellus, had originally estimated that the Marcellus contained 15 tcf of gas in a field stretching diagonally southwest across the US states of New York, Pennsylvania , West Virginia and Ohio. That afternoon, he changed the game: the Marcellus, he said, had 500 tcf of gas ready to be recovered. And with that announcement, the race was on.
