"The Downside of the Boom"
"North Dakota took on the oversight of a multibillion-dollar oil industry with a regulatory system built on trust, warnings and second chances."
"North Dakota took on the oversight of a multibillion-dollar oil industry with a regulatory system built on trust, warnings and second chances."
"It was a brisk February morning, and the governors of Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia and North Carolina were seated around a ring of tables draped with pleated beige fabric in the ornate Nest Room of Washington, D.C.’s Willard InterContinental Hotel. Sitting across the tables was Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, whom the governors had invited so they could make their case for expanding offshore energy production. It was a long-awaited meeting for the governors, and they’d armed themselves with specific 'asks' — that Jewell’s department open access to oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic, for instance, and improve 'regulatory certainty' for energy companies operating rigs off the coasts."
"BURNABY, British Columbia – An 11-year-old girl was among those arrested Sunday as a crowd protested survey work by the Texas-based Kinder Morgan company for a tar sands pipeline expansion through the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby."
"Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s ascent to the top of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee is likely to reignite the decades-old debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)."
"The Obama administration’s decision to put off issuing quotas for the use of renewable fuels this year sets up fights in Congress and the courts over a program that’s been bitterly contested for nearly a decade."
"In some regions of India, a married woman will return to her mother’s house for the last trimester of pregnancy and the birth of her child. But in Mettur, pregnant women are advised by their doctors to stay away."
"Bradford Gilde, a Houston lawyer, stumbled across some unexpected evidence as he was preparing to sue Aruba Petroleum on behalf of a North Texas couple who believed fumes from the company’s natural gas wells were making them sick."
"The United States used only 34 percent of its total coal export capacity and does not need additional terminals, according to a new report that casts doubt on plans to develop new ports on the Columbia River."
Power company Pacificorp has gone to court to prevent the Interior Department from disclosing how many birds are found dead at its wind-energy turbine sites. AP reporter Dina Cappiello has been writing an investigative series on the birds, including eagles, killed at wind farms in the U.S. The series found that federal regulators have not prosecuted or penalized wind-energy companies when their turbines kill birds and — the government has helped keep the scope of bird mortality secret.
It seemed like good news when Baker Hughes, one of the world's largest oilfield services companies, announced in Oct 2014 that it would start disclosing all the chemicals it used in its fracking operation. Now Halliburton, an even larger oilfield services company, is buying Baker Hughes. In a $34.6 billion merger. Or is it a hostile takeover?