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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.

There are six refineries in the world better than all the others.

That's the conclusion of Solomon Associates, which has an ongoing benchmarking of the world's refineries determined by a variety of tests on operational and financial performance. Those benchmarks include Solomon's Energy Intensity Index, a cost efficency index, measures of operating efficiency and the refinery's return on investment.

At some point next year, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is expected to start regulating a market that has a notional value about seven times the size of the market the agency currently regulates.

But whether that means the CFTC will have seven times the work or even if it should get a boost in funding to undertake these new regulatory duties has become a source of fierce debate between regulators, lawmakers, lobbyists and exchange executives.

President Barack Obama continues to travel the country trying to sell a weary American public on his jobs bill, but a bill he signed into law 14 months ago has already created hundreds, if not thousands of new jobs.

While US exchanges continue to argue that the Dodd-Frank Act could spur markets participants to flee for European or Asian markets once the law's mountain of new rules take place, lawyers and lobbyists are seeing a financial windfall as the rules are being developed.

There's been a long lament even in these times of high unemployment: you just can't get good people in the oil and gas business.

We're not really sure if this development is going to hurt or help that fact. But we just couldn't let it pass unnoticed.

Addendum: a similar story was passed on, this one from the Eagle Ford.

My journalism career started with writing food articles for the "Women's News" section of my local newspaper, but eventually ended up covering what might be called "Men's News": the energy sector.

Solid statistics on women in the energy field overall are scarce, but a glance around the room at any industry event will confirm it is probably not much higher than the 20% or so that has been bandied around as an estimate. To pick a random example, ExxonMobil says women make up 26% of its worldwide workforce.

In this week's Platts Oilgram News "New Frontiers" column, Leslie Moore Mira discusses the distintegration of Venezuela's once-proud state oil company, but how Colombia has been able to benefit from the exodus of its skilled employees.

The hours will probably be long, the work is likely to be heavily scrutinized, criticized and, possibly, challenged in court, and the pay is, comparatively, bad.

But résumés have been pouring in to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission as the agency moves to nearly triple its staffing levels from levels under the Bush administration.

In an age of extreme safety-consciousness following the Macondo oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, minimizing hazards is a top industry priority.

Accordingly, the International Association of Drilling Contractors' World Drilling 2011 conference prominently featured a segment on its first day of the two-day annual gathering on what it called "human-free drilling": automation of as many routine drilling tasks as possible.

I spent a few years of my sullied youth singing in a country-rock band. In that time I noticed that a lot of country songs revolved around Texas.

In fact, I recently saw an Internet list of several hundred songs whose titles invoke Texas, such as: "El Paso," "Houston," "Abilene," "San Antonio Rose," "All My Exes Live In Texas," "Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind?" "Amarillo By Morning," "Luckenbach, Texas," and so on.