International Energy Agency says Libyan oil exports halted, production down to a 'trickle'

CAIRO - Libya's oil exports have "ground to a halt" because of the fighting between rebels and pro-government forces, and it could be months before the country's crude resurfaces on world markets, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.

The Paris-based group, whose members are mainly oil-consuming industrial nations such as the United States, also said that production from the North African nation appeared to have "slowed to a trickle" as the fighting and mounting unrest prompted an exodus of foreign oil workers and led international companies to halt their operations in the country.

The IEA said that while the rebellion against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi continues, "what is becoming clearer is the country's oil production and exports could be off the market for many months due to both war-inflicted damage on oil infrastructure and international sanctions."

The fighting in Libya, which has served as the stage for the most violent of the anti-regime protests sweeping the Middle East, drove oil prices as high as almost $107 per barrel last week on the New York Mercantile Exchange before they quickly cooled after the massive earthquake that ravaged Japan. The U.S. benchmark crude futures contract was around $99 per barrel in electronic trading on the Merc on Tuesday.

The assessment, presented in the IEA's latest month oil market report, reaffirms the belief of many in the market that Libya's vital oil industry was all-but-shuttered amid the fighting. The country sits atop Africa's largest proven reserves of conventional crude, and had produced about 1.6 million barrels per day. Most of its exports went to Europe.

At least three of the major ports in the east are no longer exporting, and an official with the Arabian Gulf Oil Co. in the east said Monday that they were not expecting another tanker until mid-April from the terminal in Tobruk, near the Egyptian border.

Other ports have been shut down, with the Ras Lanouf facility suffering a fire at a kerosene storage facility. Even if they are open, tankers have steered clear because of the shelling by pro-Gadhafi forces.

Similarly, analysts believe that what little production remains is likely to have been shut in, or will be shut down, given that the net outcome of shipping oil through pipelines during a military campaign could easily be a major explosion.

Gadhafi's forces have been pushing to recapture the eastern ports, which represent at least 65 percent of the country's export capacity. The country's oil minister has said output is down by about two-thirds of its normal level, but the fighting, communication cuts and other challenges have made it impossible to independently verify the figures put forward both by the government or the rebels.

Many analysts believe that they may try to restart the fields with what limited oil labor force available to the state-run National Oil Co., but that such a step would be essentially irrelevant given that there appear to be few willing buyers of Libyan oil because of the mounting international sanctions on the country.

"While approximately half the country's output was halted in the first few weeks of the rebellion, by 11 March it appeared that production had slowed to a trickle, not least because of the fighting," the IEA said. "Indeed, it is understood that most oil field operations have been shut-in or sharply curtailed, with transport routes choked off."

Other members of the 12-nation Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries - most notably Saudi Arabia - have ramped up production to offset the loss of Libyan oil. Several minister have said there are informal discussions about whether there was a need to meet ahead of their June gathering to determine whether their output quotas needed to be revised to cool surging prices.

The IEA said OPEC crude oil output was down slightly less than 100,000 barrels per day in February, with increases from other members of the producer bloc largely offsetting the drop in Libya's production.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Nuclear energy has environmental pluses; safety remains an issue

I thought nuclear reactors were an absolute no-go for environmentalists. But I keep hearing them touted as a clean energy source. What are nuclear energy's green credentials?

Some environmentalists are indeed coming around to nuclear energy. That's because the nuclear fission process produces virtually no greenhouse gas emissions, unlike the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. (Those two fossil fuels accounted for about 70 percent of U.S. electricity in 2008. Nukes made 20 percent.) Also, fission produces neither sulfur dioxide nor nitrogen oxides, the fossil-fuel pollutants that cause acid rain.

Advocates are fond of noting that nuclear power provides 70 percent of the country's "carbon-free" energy. But nuclear energy isn't really a zero-carbon system, since you still have to build power plants, mine and enrich uranium, and transport processed fuel, all of which typically rely on CO2-emitting fuel sources. Even when the entire life cycle is taken into account, however, nuclear energy warms the planet much less than coal or natural gas. The comparison with renewables such as wind and solar (which also generate emissions in the manufacturing phase) is less cut and dried.

While it's commonly accepted that nuclear energy has a relatively dainty footprint, the question of whether new reactors would be the most cost-effective way to lower electricity-related emissions is still hotly debated. The fuel itself is relatively inexpensive, at least for the time being. But as noted in Time, recent price estimates for a large plant in Florida came in at $12 billion to $18 billion, and that's before you consider the nuclear industry's history of major cost overruns.

Some analysts say alternative methods would yield much more climate-saving bang for our buck than nuclear power. For example, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute argues that we should be investing in general efficiency measures and "micropower," a catchall term that includes cogeneration of heat and electricity, plus renewables other than big hydropower operations.

What about safety concerns? Admittedly, there's a fright factor with nuclear power. But in the 31 years since the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, there haven't been any emergencies in the United States that remotely approached the severity of that incident, though there have been some close calls.

The government's Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a set safety goal for every reactor in the country: The chance of an accident that results in radioactivity being released to the environment must be no more than one in a million, as determined by probabilistic risk assessment. But even the longest of odds will never satisfy everyone, especially after the cataclysmic drilling accident in the Gulf of Mexico. In recent years, a number of leaks of radioactive water have stoked environmentalist ire, although nearby residents were not exposed to dangerous doses of radiation.

Meanwhile, nuclear proliferation risks remain a prohibitive concern for many experts. And many environmentalists continue to give nukes the stink eye because, as the Lantern noted in an earlier column, after 50 years we still don't have a long-term plan for storing high-level commercial nuclear waste.

But long-term disposal is a problem we're saddled with no matter what: Whether we ramp up nuclear energy production or shut down all our plants tomorrow, we'll have at least 62,500 metric tons of used nuclear fuel to deal with.

Atomic energy also generates other environmental concerns. Like conventional power plants, a nuclear site cranks out electricity using steam-driven turbines. Cooling those operations often requires a whole lot of water, the drawing and releasing of which can affect aquatic wildlife.

Uranium mining can also damage the environment. Mining and milling operators must deal with mill tailings, the radioactive material left over after the uranium has been extracted from the ore, as well as waste rock and radiologically contaminated equipment.

For all this, it's worth noting that uranium is a very efficient energy source: One ton of natural uranium can produce the same number of kilowatt-hours as 16,000 tons of coal or 80,000 barrels of oil.

The Lantern doesn't find herself particularly freaked out by atomic energy. The long-term waste conundrum seems more pressing: After all, isn't the notion that you don't bequeath problems to your descendants a major tenet of environmentalism? At the same time, global warming is itself a dire legacy, and every energy technology has its pitfalls. So if nuclear power can play a role in cooling our planet, the Lantern thinks it deserves to stay on the table.

Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com. Read previous Green Lantern columns here.

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Administration reverses offshore drilling policy in eastern gulf, Atlantic

The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it will not allow offshore oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico or off the Atlantic coast through 2017, reversing two key policy changes the president embraced in late March.

The revised Interior Department drilling plan, which took industry officials and many environmentalists by surprise, will also delay the next two lease sales in the central and western Gulf of Mexico. It marks a sharp political shift by the White House - yanking concessions to conservatives and oil companies - in the wake of the massive BP oil spill and the collapse of comprehensive climate legislation.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters that the decision to remove large swaths from the 2012-17 offshore lease plan was "based on our nation's experience with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill." Instead of opening up new areas to oil and gas exploration, Salazar said, the United States should "focus and expand our critical resources on areas that are currently active."

Salazar said the department would also gather new environmental information about drilling off the coast of Alaska, potentially postponing activity there.

The move eliminates the prospect of any drilling taking place off the coast of Virginia for several years, although as recently as eight months ago state and federal officials had envisioned holding a lease sale there in 2011. On March 31, President Obama declared his administration would study the prospect of energy exploration off the Atlantic coast from Delaware to Florida, along with areas in the eastern gulf and in Alaska's Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R), who spoke to Salazar by phone Wednesday, called the new policy "an irresponsible and shortsighted decision."

"It demonstrates a complete lack of confidence in the entrepreneurial spirit of American industry and its ability to fix the problems experienced in the gulf spill, and no confidence in the ability of the U.S. government to better plan for and react to offshore emergencies," said McDonnell, who had made drilling off Virginia's coast one of his top priorities.

"The cost of today's decision will be seen in major lost job opportunities, surrendered economic growth and increased dependence on foreign sources of energy, from nations often hostile to American interests," he said.

Criticism was bipartisan. A spokesman for Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said that "while it is appropriate to take the time to incorporate lessons learned from the gulf disaster, Senator Warner sees no reason to delay this process for what realistically could be another seven years or more."

Offshore oil production from state and federal waters accounts for 9 percent of U.S. liquid fuel consumption and 32 percent of U.S. crude oil production. The Interior Department draws up five-year plans for lease sales to companies seeking to explore federal waters, which begin three miles from shore. If oil or gas is discovered, commercial production can begin some years later. The next five-year plan starts in 2012.

Interior said the lease sales scheduled for March and August 2011 in the central and western gulf would be postponed until the end of next year, if not later.

In addition, Interior will conduct a "supplemental" environmental analysis of Shell's plan to drill an exploratory well in the Beaufort Sea next summer. Officials said that Interior was "processing" Shell's permit request but that the new analysis will require another public comment period, ending Dec. 22. Shell has warned that delays could jeopardize its ability to prepare in time to drill next year.

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Calif.'s Prop 23 battle pits Big Oil against environmental concerns

Mix together a couple of big oil refiners, an arch-conservative oil tycoon, "green tech" venture capitalists, a former secretary of state and California's far-reaching climate legislation, and stir.

The result is one of the most volatile and expensive political battles of the year.

The issue is Proposition 23, a California referendum that would shelve the state's four-year-old climate legislation until unemployment there falls to 5.5 percent - more than half the current level - which economists agree could take many years. The delay would upend a myriad of solar, wind and low-emission automobile projects.

The referendum has also become a test case about the power of corporate money - mostly from two Texas-based firms - and a measure of how much climate change is sucking wind as a political cause. Fresh off their defeat on a climate bill in Congress, environmentalists and their allies are fighting to prevent their biggest policy success from being rolled back in the country's most "green"-friendly state.

The California legislation would slash greenhouse emissions by 30 percent, limit tailpipe emissions and set targets for utilities' renewable energy use.

A game of big money

One indicator of the emotional charge surrounding the debate was the language Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) used to attack Prop 23 supporters.

"Does anyone really believe that these companies, out of the goodness of their black oil hearts, are spending millions and millions of dollars to protect jobs?" Schwarzenegger said recently. "This is like Eva Braun writing a kosher cookbook. It's not about jobs at all, ladies and gentlemen. It's about their ability to pollute and thus protect their profits."

The proposition held a slight lead at one point, according to polls, but is now narrowly trailing.

The measure was the brain child of a state legislator, a Sacramento lobbyist who has represented tobacco companies and two oil refiners.

By early October, Valero Energy, the nation's biggest refiner, had poured $4 million into an ad campaign, public records show. Tesoro, the other refiner, has matched that, a company official said. The Koch brothers, who have supported the tea party movement and other conservative causes, added more than $1 million. Other donors brought the total to $16 million.

But Big Oil isn't the only big money in California.

Lined up against the refiners are a group of wealthy fund managers, clean technology investors, environmental groups and onetime Reagan secretary of state George Shultz, who believes that "climate issues are very real" and that Proposition 23 is "a very bad thing."

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System Ninja 3.0.0

Clean up and remove unwanted files System Ninja is a program for cleaning your computer of unwanted junk that constantly slows your entire system down. Apart from the useful file cleaner, the program also has a Startup Manager, Process Manager and P3P Registry History cleaning tool.

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Portable Coollector Movie Database 4.0.8

Manage your video collection The program can even scan a folder on your computer and make the associations automatically for you. Even if you don't have a large collection of videos there are still many useful things that you can do.

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Android Video Converter 2.0

Convert Android videos to other videos Android video converter helps you to convert all sorts of video files to Android device compatible file format. So that you can play any files on your android device. It can even convert the DVD movies and other video to Android supported video files

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PCHeal 2.2.3.2014d

Fix and boost your computer speed PcHeal is a tool for all that allows you to modify your computers settings to increase performance and prevent crashes. No modifications to your hardware are made and all adjustments and settings are done in an easy to use interface.

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