Recently in Upstream Category

In his much-hyped State of the Union address this past week, President Barack Obama gave a rhetorical bearhug to US energy development, even stealing a line from Republicans and pronouncing the need for an "all-out, all-of-the-above strategy" on increasing energy production.

Canada's official exit from the Kyoto treaty -- an act undertaken by one of the pact's biggest public supporters -- could be seen as a significant win for the oil sands industry. But that sector is facing a host of other issues, including rising costs. Platts correspondent Gary Park, in this week's Oilgram News column "Petrodollars," reviews the landscape.

More than just a playground for winter-weary northerners, The Bahamas serves as a key distribution center for the world's oil.

It's home to Buckeye's Borco and Statoil's South Riding Point terminals that, with a combined 29 million barrels of storage -- and growing -- makes the island nation the region's largest transshipment poin of other countries' oil.

In case anyone hadn't noticed, January 10 is the 111st anniversary not only of the Texas "awl bidness" (that's Texan for oil business, to all you non-Lone Stars) but also of Big Oil.

On that day in 1901, the Lucas well at Spindletop, a salt dome oil field sited south of what is now the city of Beaumont, Texas came in and was soon producing more than 100,000 b/d of oil.

Republican presidential candidates are trying to outdo each other to show how pro-drilling they would be if they occupied the White House. But as Platts' Gary Gentile explains in this week's Regulation & the Environment column in Platts Oilgram News, the president's power is not all that it's cracked up to be.

Despite the buildup of more than a year and a half of anticipation, it was still difficult to get a read on the likely bidding behavior of oil companies as the time came for Western Gulf of Mexico Lease Sale 218 this week.