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It's hard to say with a straight face that 2011 for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was truly historic.

The idea of historians a century from now breathlessly discussing the debate over the federal commodity position limits regime or a new market manipulation standard may seem downright absurd.

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.

In the latest installment of the joint Platts/Oil Council podcast "Oil Matters," the focus is on shale gas.

But it's not one more chapter in the "shale gas is creating an energy revolution" story. Rather, it's how the low price of natural gas in the US as a result of supplies from the shale are about to start hurting some gas consumers. The financing that allowed some merchant power plant to be built sometimes included hedges that assumed a higher natural gas price. With those hedges coming off, it counter-intuitively can be bad news for the facilities' owners, even though they are buyers of natural gas.

Iskender H. "Alex" Catto, a partner with McDermott Will & Emery LLP in New York, spoke with Platts' John Kingston about his forecast. You can listen to it here.

A billion barrels here. A billion barrels there. Pretty soon you're talking about a lot of oil. 

When it comes to ExxonMobil's Julia discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, however, the only projection the company actually has ever provided is one vague word: "significant."

But that didn't stop industry analysts and journalists from freaking out recently at the language used by ExxonMobil lawyers in a lawsuit against the US government contesting rejection of an extension on the company's lease at that prospect. More specifically, in the first paragraph of their pleadings, the legal team charged the rejection is "depriving ExxonMobil of the right to produce a reservoir believed to hold billions of barrels of oil."

European energy policy makers are caught in a difficult position: the targets set for carbon emissions reductions imply that almost no gas will be used in power generation without the hitherto-untested technology and unknown costs of carbon capture and storage. This will be a pricey burden for consumers.

And yet the emphasis on renewables, which is mostly wind, implies a need for a commensurate amount of gas in storage as back-up for wind. This will also be expensive.

The Oil Council, as it did last October, brought together a panel of executives in New York April 21 to meet with the media and talk about pretty much everything. There wasn't one overriding theme, but when industry executives get together in the US these days, shale gas and its impact on so many parts of the business is never far from their minds. 

Here are some of the main points that the panelists discussed. These are a summation of their main thoughts, with direct quotes marked as such: