Recently in Company doings Category

When US refiners release fourth quarter earnings in a couple weeks it's going to be ugly. That point was driven home today when Hovensa, the joint Hess-PDVSA refinery in St. Croix, said it was joining a list of other East Coast refineries in shutting its doors.

For the refinery business as a whole, a string of losses are expected as big discounts for WTI-priced crudes were erased during an already weak period.

Some immediate thoughts on the delay of the White House/State Department acting on the Keystone XL pipeline.

As Tokyo prepares for Christmas, a very big holiday here, Jose Sergio Gabrielli de Azevedo showed up in Japan's capital with what he wanted Santa to bring him. It was a lot more than 12 drummers drumming and five gold rings.

The Petrobras CEO has been making a grand tour of Asia the past two weeks, speaking and holding media briefings in Singapore (at Singapore International Energy Week), South Korea and Tokyo.

Shale has quickly grown a paradox complex: For industry, it's a newly tapped crude and gas bonanza that has already begun to reverse the nation's oil fortunes. For part of the the public, it's a mysterious new source of hydrocarbons with a method of extraction -- fracking -- that possesses more dangers than benefits.
 
Belatedly, the government is being sought as an arbiter of sorts, to dispel misinformation and to ensure safe extraction. At the federal level, the EPA is in the process of hammering out rules that govern fracking. But at the state and county level, the rules of the game remain a little less certain. Such was the case recently in California, which has the unusual position of being one of the most environmentally-regulated states in the country, but also very much a big oil producer.

Platts this week revealed the Platts Top 250 Global Energy Company Rankings. Some of the observations about what the survey revealed were discussed in a recent edition of Platts Commodity Pulse video, which can be viewed here.

And an addendum: Platts' Vandana Hari discusses the Top 250 with CNBC India here.

Australian chemical company Penrice Soda Holdings this week took a big step toward realizing a commercial project using innovative technology to produce saleable chemicals from brine extracted from coalseam gas water.

Penrice CEO Guy Roberts first spoke to Platts in November 2010 about the company's plans to use a new method to treat brine from water produced by thousands of coalseam gas wells to be drilled in the eastern state of Queensland. Penrice subsequently signed an agreement with US-based GE Power & Water to build pilot plants to demonstrate the technology.