Drilling In The Artic?

The Arctic holds as many as 90bn barrels of undiscovered oil and has as much undiscovered gas as all the reserves known to exist in Russia, US government scientists have said in the first state assessment of the region.

The estimates could fuel the race among polar nations, such as Russia, the US, Denmark, Norway and Canada, vying for control of the region, though the study said Russia and the Alaska platform appeared to have the most undiscovered resources.

The 90bn barrels of undiscovered oil the US Geological Survey believes the Arctic holds is 13 per cent of the world's undiscovered oil – about the known reserves of the United Arab Emirates. The 1,669,000bn cubic feet of natural gas are equivalent to 30 per cent of undiscovered gas reserves.

Coal Companies Cleaning Up?

Today, the Financial stocks were in complete meltdown. Stocks like Washing Mutual(WM) were down 35% along with Freddie Mac (FRE) and Fannie Mae (FNM). The one sector that did pretty well today was Coal. And why wouldn't it?

According to newsletter editor Byron King, the future for coal is promising;
“The U.S. Air Force is putting together a program to develop a domestic synthetic jet fuel. Just as the Air Force does not employ many geologists, neither does it run refineries. So the USAF has proposed to lease acreage on its vast land holdings to private industry. The idea is that private investment will build U.S. plants to convert U.S. coal to liquid fuels.

“The U.S. Air Force wants to leverage private industry and capital to construct a synthetic jet fuel industry. And then the USAF will become the final buyer for the product.

“The USAF is among the world’s largest fuel users… it is behind about 10% of all the jet fuel that gets burned in the U.S. So just selling jet fuel to the USAF constitutes a major market.”

In other words, the government is looking to solve a big chunk of our oil dilemma with coal, a naturally abundant resource in the U.S.

Looks like those coal mining stocks should see a light at the end of the tunnel!

Brazil Still Booming

Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state- controlled oil company, plans to add 14,000 engineers, geologists and drillers within three years as it develops the biggest crude discovery in the Western Hemisphere since 1976.

Petrobras, as the company is known, plans to expand its workforce 23 percent to about 74,000, surpassing Chevron Corp., the second-largest U.S. oil producer. The hiring binge is part of a $112.7 billion expansion that may allow Brazil to overtake the output of all OPEC members except Saudi Arabia.
Petrobras lacks the roughnecks, or rig workers, and other staff needed to tap billions of barrels that lie in the offshore oil finds. The company is trying to hire more than a dozen people a day amid intensifying competition for skilled oil workers after crude prices surged to a record.

– Bloomberg

TransOcean's First Quarter Profit Doubles

Transocean Inc., the world's largest offshore oil driller, said first-quarter profit more than doubled as record crude prices increased exploration for new reserves.

Net income rose to $1.19 billion, or $3.71 a share, from $553 million, or $2.62, a year earlier, the Houston-based company said today in a statement.

Oil producers are expanding the search for untouched oil reserves from India to the Canadian Arctic as record prices make previously uneconomic fields worth drilling. Companies will spend $380 billion boring 20,000 offshore wells during the next five years, according to analysts at Douglas-Westwood Ltd.

Sales more than doubled to $3.11 billion from $1.33 billion. The average first-quarter rent for Transocean's ultra-deepwater floating rigs was $380,800 a day, up 26 percent from a year earlier.

The company tripled its cash and cash equivalents to $1.57 billion.
– Bloomberg