Muscle Building Blog

North Sea oil exploration suffering as banks refuse to lend Recession may push North Sea oil and gas production into a much steeper decline than previously forecast due to the difficulties faced by smaller oil companies in getting finance to pay for exploration and oilfield development. Industry leaders warned in Aberdeen yesterday at a media briefing that up to a quarter of the 20 billion barrels of oil known to be still recoverable from the North Sea may stay in the ground because of th

Michael Lynch: ‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy REMEMBER “peak oil”? It’s the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe. Well, just when we thought that the collapse in oil prices since last summer had put an end to such talk, along comes Fatih Birol, the top economist at the International Energy Agency, to insist that we’ll reach the peak moment

Iraq Oil a Big Draw for Chinese HONG KONG — As the world’s second-largest and fastest-growing consumer of oil, China is showing increasing interest in oil fields in a country that had seemed until very recently to be firmly in the American sphere of influence for natural resources: Iraq. Chinese oil companies are expected to bid in Iraq’s oil field auctions that are set to start Tuesday, although Sinopec, the China National Petroleum Corporation and the China National Offshore Oil Corpor