north sea
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Wed 4 Jul 2007
Venezuela’s decision to sell petrol to Iran to alleviate its ally’s crippling fuel shortage reminds us that future supplies of fuel may not follow market economics but geopolitical fault lines. President Hugo Chávez made the promise during a visit to Tehran where he pledged an “axis of unity” with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The two countries will, united, defeat the imperialism of North America,” he told reporters. With a smile he added: “When I come to Iran, Washington gets upset.”
Closer to home the 2007 Economic Report of industry organisation Oil & Gas UK published yesterday warned that government targets of keeping Britain’s oil and gas production at 3m barrels a day by 2010 look like being missed.
Fri 30 Mar 2007
In the wake of Gordon Brown’s steal-from-the-poor-to-give-to-the-rich budget, it was reported that what had changed the Chancellor’s borrowing forecast was the decline in revenues from North Sea oil. “What has changed our forecast is what happened to North Sea revenues.” Mr Brown said North Sea oil revenues would be £5.5bn lower than expected for 2007/08 but argued that the reduction was due to factors outside the government’s control. “That’s no fault of the government. It’s lower production from the North Sea. We have to take that into account,” Mr Brown told the BBC’s Today programme. That the electorate might reasonably expect the government to factor in the rapid depletion in North Sea oil reserves to their financial forecasting seemed to be beyond him. “The chancellor is becoming as bad at forecasting oil and gas revenues as he is at estimating the cost of the London Olympics,” commented SNP leader Alex Salmond. Reserve depletion fed into a 9% decline in production last year. When the UK government can’t even make a realistic short term assessment of declining UK production it is perhaps unsurprisingly they appear guiless in the face of the global situation. (more…)
