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The growth of United States' shale oil and gas production over the last decade has been nothing short of phenomenal. Already the premier natural gas producer, Already the premier natural gas producer, the United States is poised to surpass Saudi Arabia and Russia as the largest oil producer and will likely become a net exporter of both oil and gas within a decade or more.

The post Shale oil and gas in the United States [infographic] appeared first on OUPblog.

May Contain Spoilers

From Amazon:

Review:

I wanted to read The Oil Tycoon and Her Sexy Sheikh because I was curious to see how the conflict between the characters would be portrayed.  Olivia is an executive at a successful oil company, and in order to ensure that she will take her father’s place  when he retires, she needs to land the contract to drill for oil in the waters off of Saqat.  Khaled is next in line to rule the country, but he is also a marine biologist.  He has studied the long term effects of oil spills on marine life, and what he has learned is discouraging.  It takes far longer than originally thought for the aquatic ecosystem to recover from the devastating consequences of a spill, and he is reluctant to allow any corporation to set up shop in his coastal waters.  He doesn’t believe that safety precautions go far enough, and he thinks that the cleanup efforts outlined in the contract are also lacking.  But tempering his reluctance to open up Saqat to oil investors is the need to alleviate the poverty of his  people.  The money from oil production would help bring education and improvements in medical care, and it is very difficult for him to turn that down.  I enjoyed this conflict between these two driven people.  Olivia is gung-ho to prove herself to the naysayers at her father’s company, and Khaled wants what’s best for both his country and his people.  This puts them at odds with each other, and it is a heavy weight on Khaled’s shoulders.  Does he allow these foreigners into the pristine waters, when there is a potential that they will bring ruin to the fragile ecosystem?

While I found the business negotiations interesting, I was not convinced about the romantic conflict between Khaled and Olivia.  They are instantly attracted to each other, but because Khaled is next in line to inherit the throne, he tries to put the brakes on their budding relationship.  It just can’t work out for them, because he has a duty to his people.  Their relationship can’t go anywhere, because he is expected to marry a quiet, respectable Muslim girl from Saqat, and Olivia just doesn’t fit into the mold he has imagined his future wife must fit  into.  I didn’t buy into this conflict because the only person wh

This is a satire on the Northern Gateway oil pipeline by Dan Murphy, political cartoonist for a Vancouver BC newspaper. According to news reports, he is speaking out because he has been pressured to pull it, due to oil corporation Enbridge allegedly threatening to withdraw its advertising from the newspaper if he doesn’t.

It all began in November of 2010 when the military regime decided to release opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi who, since 1989, had been on house arrest under charges of attempting to divide the military. A few months later in the March of 2011, former Prime Minister and military hero Thein Sein was sworn in as President of the rapidly changing government. Among the numerous bold moves President Sein has made since assuming his new role in the fragile nation, arguably the most shocking has been the discontinuation of the controversial $3.6 billion Myitsone dam, a project funded by eager Chinese investors to generate electricity for millions of Chinese. What’s more, the West, most notably the United States, has seen this move by President Sein as a clear sign that his countries relations with the Chinese are turning sour. This is one of the reasons the Americans recently sent Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the first American official to visit the country in fifty years, to speak with President Sein about a host of issues ranging from the severing of ties with North Korea to prolonged relief on economic sanctions girding the people of Burma. As America embarks on a new season of brinkmanship with the Burmese government, it is eminently important to understand the reasons why we are now so eager to embrace the new government while also studying the global implications of Burma turning a shoulder to their neighbors from the East, the Chinese.
Below is an excerpt from author David Steinberg’s book, Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know. Here, Steinberg details the economic and strategic interests China desires in Burma. – Nick, OUP USA

Although we can only speculate on Chinese motivation for the close relationship with the Myanmar authorities, strategic and economic issues seem paramount. Chinese influence in Myanmar is potentially helpful in any rivalry that might again develop with India, although Sino-Indian relations now are quite cordial. As China expands its regional influence and develops a blue-water navy, Myanmar provides access to the Bay of Bengal and supplements other available port facilities for the Chinese in the Indian Ocean in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka – called a “string of [Chinese] pearls.” Although the southern reaches of Myanmar are at the extreme western end of the Straits of Malacca, the free use of these straits are critical strategic concerns to China, Japan, Korea, and the United States. Some Chinese sources consider continued access to the straits to be a critical policy objective, and a close relationship with Myanmar is a potential advantage. Eighty percent of imported Chinese oil passes through these straits. To the extent that pipelines for oil and gas cross Myanmar and relieve Chinese dependence on the vulnerable Straits of Malacca, this is clearly in China’s strategic interests.

Access to energy sources is both a strategic and economic concern. Diversification of the supply of oil, natural gas, and hydroelectric power is an issue in which Myanmar looms large. The exploitation of offshore natural gas fields in Myanmar is important, as is the ability to transport that gas, as well as Middle Eastern crude oil, to China avoiding the Straits of Malacca, which is a strategic plus for China. China is helping construct some thirty dams, most of which will supply electricity to Yunnan Province as well as power and irrigation water to parts of Myanmar.

Under the SLORC/SPDC,

By Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green After World War II, economic development was at the top of the agendas of virtually every reservation. Unemployment was almost universal, family incomes were virtually nil, and the tribes had no income beyond government appropriations to the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]. Some reservations did have natural resources. Some tribes own important timber reserves, but mineral resources attracted most postwar attention. Thirty percent of the low-sulfur coal west of the Mississippi is on Indian land, as is 5 to 10 percent of the oil and gas and some 50 to 80 percent of the uranium. Congress enacted legislation in 1918 and again in 1938 to authorize the secretary of the interior to negotiate leases to develop tribal mineral resources.

With the founding of the Canada Council for the Arts over 50 years ago,the government of Canada has always recognized the fundamental importance of supporting a diverse range of artistic practices at “arm’s length”, meaning that no political party ever has the right to dictate to artists what they can do, even when supported by public money.

Until now.

Franke James’ work is political, yes. But in a democracy, this is desirable. The critical examination of policy through the arts opens up discussion in a way that ultimately helps make stronger, wiser policy.

Unfortunately, the current regime has decided that censorship is ok. I’m embarrassed my country is being lead by such anti-intellectual fascists, and I’m worried. These are not the values this country was founded upon.

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By Benjamin Ross

The vast scale of this summer’s spill offers no guarantee that there will be real change. Its oil slicks are far from being the first to afflict our coasts – floating oil first became a national scandal nearly a century ago. The issue has been a political football ever since, with the oil industry exercising its political muscle again and again to fend off outside oversight.

Remarkably, it’s not just environmentalist outsiders who have criticized the petroleum producers’ resistance to regulation. Since oil spills first became an issue, the industry’s own experts have told their employers that to prevent spills, the discretion of company management must be limited.  Controls work only when they are imposed from the outside.

The controversy first arose in the years after World War I, when floating oil became a national scandal. Fouled beaches and dead birds shut down ocean resorts, whose owners organized to seek relief. They were joined – so severe was the problem – by fire insurance companies, burdened by claims for burning docks.

As in the Gulf this summer, the search for causes brought finger-pointing. Oil companies blamed steamships and their practice of filling drained fuel tanks with seawater. The unfiltered ballast was dumped into harbors when it was time to reload. Shipowners pointed back at wastes from refineries.

After a fierce lobbying battle, the Oil Pollution Act of 1924 exempted the refineries. But as the price of this victory, the newly formed American Petroleum Institute promised that the industry would police itself.  An API technical committee quickly came up with a program to control the oil discharges. It designed devices to separate oil from ballast water and wrote a long manual on refinery waste. The committee recommended that the trade association send out inspectors with the power to compel compliance with these practices. But this idea was shot down by objections from member companies, and self-regulation became purely voluntary.

The New Deal put water pollution control back on the national agenda. The oil industry, advised by the API to “play poker rather than throwing down its cards in advance,” adopted a strategy of undeviating opposition to federal oversight. This effort was crowned with success in 1940 when a bill to regulate new sources of pollution, passed by the House, died in conference committee.

Peacetime concerns, the environment among them, returned with the end of World War II, and oil companies received another expert warning. The chair of the API’s committee on refinery wastes admonished the readers of National Petroleum News in 1946 against “the futility of adhering further to the policy of objection and obstruction.”

This message too went unheard. The industry continued to resist outside control, and a Republican congress gave them a sympathetic ear. The toothless Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 limited the federal role to research, training, and grants to local governments.

Laws were at last passed to put polluters under federal supervision in the 1970s, following a well blowout off Santa Barbara and other well-publicized ecological disasters. Statutes governing oil spills were further tightened after the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989.

But laws by themselves provide no guarantee of effective supervision.  The people who write and enfor

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The world’s total annual consumption of crude oil is one cubic mile of oil (CMO). The world’s total annual energy consumption – from all energy sources – is currently 3 CMO. By the middle of this century the world will need between 6 and 9 CMO of energy per year to provide for its citizens.

In their new book, Hewitt Crane, Edwin Kinderman, and Ripudaman Malhotra introduce this brand new measuring unit and show that the use of CMO replaces mind-numbing multipliers (such as billions, trillions, and quadrillions) with an easy-to-understand volumetric unit. It evokes a visceral response and allows experts, policy makers and the general public alike to form a mental picture of the magnitude of the challenge we face.

Here, Ripu Malhotra answers some questions we had about oil, energy, climate change, and more.

Q: What is the goal of your book, A Cubic Mile of Oil?

A: Raising literacy about energy in the general public. Meeting the global demand for energy is going to be a daunting challenge, and the way we choose to do it, namely the energy sources that we choose to employ will have a profound effect on the lives of millions of people. We have tried to provide an unvarnished look at the different energy sources so people can engage in an informed dialog about the choices we make. People have to be involved in making the choice, or the choice will be made for them.

Q: Why introduce a cubic mile of oil as another unit of energy? There are so many units for energy already.

A: True, there are way too many units of energy in use. Furthermore, different sources of energy are often expressed in different sets of units: kilowatt-hours of electricity, barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, tons of coal, and so on. Each of these units represents a relatively small amount of energy, and in order to express production and consumption at a global or national scale, we have to use mind-numbing multipliers like millions, billions, trillions and quadrillions. To add to the confusion, a billion and a trillion mean different things in different parts of the world. It gets very difficult to keep it straight.

Q: Who coined the term CMO?

A: Hew Crane came up with this term. He was waiting in a gas line in 1973 when he began contemplating how much oil the world was then using annually. He made some guesses of the number cars, and the miles driven by each, etc., and came up with an estimate approaching a trillion gallons. How large a pool would hold that quantity, he next pondered. A few slide rule strokes later realized that the pool would have to a mile long, a mile wide and a mile deep—a cubic mile!

Q: What is your overall message?

A: Currently, the global annual consumption of oil stands at 1 cubic mile. Additionally, the world uses 0.8 CMO of energy from coal, 0.6 from natural gas, roughly 0.2 from each of hydro, nuclear, and wood for a grand total of 3 CMO. Solar, wind, and biofuels barely register on this scale; combined they produced a total of 0.03 CMO i

As we are busy blaming “BP” for messing up the Gulf of mexico I would suggest a solution for oil barriers along the beautiful beaches there and in fact all along our coastlines. First I will direct you to search floating “debris in the gulf of Mexico”.

There are enough objects floating there that if gathered and strung along the beaches could cover all the coastlines of our country I believe. It is floating so we would not have to buy new floating barriers, all we need is nets, which could be made from shredding more of the junk out in the ocean. “BP” didn’t put it there, it came from the cities along the waterways that feed into the gulf.

Though much of it is oil byproducts washed out from storm drains, a lot came from the “Beautiful” beaches and those “Valuable tourists” that are so afraid of getting a tar ball on their tootsies visited and left behind. They should come back and volunteer to help clean it if they really care!

I also propose instead of dredging sand that will destroy animal habitat we build berms of the garbage that came from those beaches in the first place. It may be ugly, to say the least, but it would do more for the fish and birds in the region that get trapped in it than any other thing I can think of, just cover it with a small portion of sand from the tourist beaches.

The wild life doesn’t want it and it’s only fare that the people that made it take it back and recycle it or something. They need to pay for every bit of the pollution just like “BP”, all of us who let that junk float out to sea should pay for it to be cleaned up!

If an honest look at what is in the ocean was taken “BP” would look like small potatoes or in this case oil  byproduct pollution.

I don’t know of anyone who isn’t aware of  the oil spill in the Gulf, but do you know how to do something about it?  Though I live off the Gulf Coast, I felt removed from the situation… reading about the oil’s progression and tsk tsk-ing those who drag their feet in it’s resolution. So what can we do?

It takes someone like Kelly Light and her daughter to begin a movement!

They have created a blog called Ripple where you can purchase an Artist Trading Card and the donations will go directly to the cause. Each sketchcard on the blog is $10.00. The $10.00 is a donation to help the animal victims of the Deep Water Horizon Gulf Oil Spill. Every penny is donated. The two Non-Profits that are benefitting are The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies and The International Bird Rescue Research Center.

This crisis is so heart wrenching and it’s the innocent who are suffering! Please won’t you visit the Ripple blog and donate. If you are an artist perhaps you want to donate your work in the form of an art card. The information for doing so is on the Ripple blog.

I’ve created two cards. One will be on it’s way to a kind person in Hawaii on Monday the other, a sea turtle,  will go up on the Ripple blog and will be for sale along with the other artist created cards.

Ripple A small sketch- a small donation-each small act helps!

A world of inspiration over at Daniel Robbins’ blog. Dig through the breathtaking flora fetish at the beginning to get to his oil studies and moleskine sketches (of which I wish there were more).

Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: daniel robbins, moleskine, oil, painting, paintings, sketches

When I was young and dreamt of being a children’s writer, I never imagined it would take me to China but that’s where I have recently been, invited by the British Schools of Beijing and Guangzhou to do my author/drama practitioner stuff for 3.5 days. Of course, by the time I’d added a couple of days sight-seeing in both Beijing and Hong Kong plus my time in transit, the whole trip took 11 days and I doubt if I’ll have made much profit but I have had an amazing, mind-expanding trip, moments of which I’ll never forget (especially three of us crammed into a motorised rick-shaw built for two, being driven down three lanes of heavy traffic in the Beijing rush-hour. Or my encounter with a taxi driver who, quite typically in Beijing taxi drivers doesn’t know where anywhere is but isn’t going to lose face by admitting it!)
This, however, is not the place for a travel blog. What of all of this, is relevant to children’s writing? Well....possibly the books I read. Late at night and on journeys, there was the luxury of time to read. On the flight out, I sweated my way through ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. Very gripping. I would like to write gripping books for children, but without making readers nauseous with terror, without depicting scenes of violence degrading to women, without having a mind which pictures these things. I see from the sequel sample that the opening chapter is more of the same. Thanks but I think I’ve got the message!
With some relief I turned ot ‘The Roar’, the summer choice of my children’s book group by newcomer Emma Clayton. I enjoyed it. I had issues with the structure and the ending, all too frustratingly set up for what I expect will be a trilogy, but there was much to admire, not least the terrifyingly convincing picture of another world where the rich have quite literally built on top of the poor, condemning them to a life in the dreadful ‘Shadows’, a subterranean world of mould and darkness and squalor.
And then there was Leslie Wilson’s ‘Saving Rafael’, a refreshing spin on the holocaust novel – which I dropped in the bath! Really sorry, Leslie, but at least I was so gripped that I carried on reading and kept it in a plastic bag!
What connects there 3 books? Well...moral outrage, I think. It’s there in all of them. Steig Larsson, though I question his methods, is quietly ranting about violence against women and fraud, the strong terrorising those they perceive as weak. Emma Clayton is outraged by what we are doing to our world, both physically and socially. And Leslie, of course, is outraged by the holocaust – by our inhumanity.
We bloggers are all creators of story. We are all entertainers. But so many of us are also something else. Reflectors. Commentators. Prophets. Preachers. Voices crying in the wilderness?
So what, as I turn to story making again, be it on page or stage, should I be writing about? I could do moral outrage a-plenty after this trip. I have been treated with the utmost respect and courtesy throughout my stay in China – but supposing I had been a Chinese writer during the cultural revolution? Hmm. And Chairman Mao is still hugely honoured as a great hero by the ordinary Chinese. In Hong Kong I found a market full of stunning tropical fish, hung up in plastic bags, terrapins and turtles in tiny crates and puppies for sale in Perspex boxes measuring about 60cm beneath little dog jackets bearing the words. ‘We love all pets.’ Not far away, another market sold caged birds by the hundred.
A couple of weeks before I left, I stopped a child from kicking a plastic water bottle around during our break at Youth Theatre.

Here it is, finally! Snow White. I enjoyed this adventure in oil and I look to start my next very soon.

I uploaded a pretty big file for you guys to see. The scan didn't quite pick up some of the variations and subtitles in the hair and it is where the paint is thickest so I think that was part of it. Overall I'm very pleased and enjoyed my time.

Realistic 3D cover illustration about data clouds as the new oil.

More at Sevensheaven.nl

Approaching final details with this piece. I'm laying in the final darks, a mixture of Prussian Blue, Alizarin Crimson, and Burnt Umber. This makes a nice raven blue-black that I like.






With her hair now undeniably black it really throws the face into a deathly pale light. In the next stage I gave her blood-red lips (all along she's meant to be Snow White) and it makes her face much more haunting that I had imagined or intended. I feel like it works but it surprised me.

The thing that keeps nagging me about this is I feel that when it's close up, when you see the face full (like in the last detail pictures) it works. Everything works for me. But, when you step back too far it doesn't hold up quite as well. I'm not sure why this is. I'm curious if anyone thinks that too or has any ideas.

Next post : Final.

With this phase in the oil painting I felt like I was zeroing in on the final piece.

Here we are at stage 3, the first glaze of red. It went ok. It pushed the highlights back more than I thought it would but I'll be refining the painting at the end so that's fine.




Next post : I went crazy and blued up my shadows, glazed the whole thing blue. Prussian blue to the rescue! (or doom) remains to be seen.

I love oil. I believe it's the second most worthy medium after marble sculpture. I don't do sculpture but to me it's the single greatest art form imaginable. Then comes oil.

Watercolor? It's for lighthouses unless you are John Singer Sargent. Sidewalk chalk? Maybe.

In any case that is my opinion.

I'm working towards learning the Dutch-Flemish method of painting. To my understanding, it simply involves a fully resolved underpainting with finished values; color applied in glazes.

With that in mind, here is the first stage :

I've fixed the drawing to a board and with some kind of medium (I forget what, Justin helped me with this part) You can see the drawing just barely in the first picture below, the stray pencil lines. I wish I had photographed it before hand. I did a probably half finished drawing.

Once that was dry I did my first toning. I used Burnt Umber. I then rubbed out the face some to make some light/shadow and started drawing in the details with paint.



Next I painted the hair. I had forgotten how wonderful it is to glide a brush across a surface.



This first pass at the underpainting is complete. I let this dry. When it's totally dry I could (and did) make mistakes in the next phase but because the foundation was dry I could simply rub the mistake out.

In all likeliness, what I'm doing here is trying to make oils work like watercolors, watercolors come more naturally to me. I have a harder time working opaquely. So color glazes, being more akin to watercolor has me intrigued.

Next post : The painting the highlights.

5 x 7
Polychromos and mineral oil on illustration board, fixed with matte fixative

Hmmm. This is what I worked on this afternoon. I wanted to try a piece in this new pencil + oil technique, but with a dark background. I set the cherries up on a purple/plum colored plate and worked from life, in natural light.

Here's what I learned:

The oil over the dark background didn't bleed into the cherries, which is a good thing.

If you're going to do a dark background, save it for when you have time to really get into it, and not for a shorter study, like this.

In theory a dark background can make something colorful pop ~ it can also dull it down. Hard to tell which way its gonna go.

Make sure you can finish the piece before the light changes too dramatically, or else you're going to have problems.

You can do layers of pencil, oil, more pencil, more oil, more pencil, blend with a blending stump, more pencil, then spray fixative, with no bleeding or problems.

Be focused, and not thinking about snacks, or that turkey that was in the yard again, or a nap, or what that weird dream about marrying that guy from the past was all about.

If anyone is super crazy about this I will put it up for sale, gladly. I'm so used to working with a light background, I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I might do another one of the cherries with a white background, not sure. I have other work I have to do tomorrow, and then something else the day after, so not sure how long the cherries will hold up in the frig. I may have to eat them before I get to draw them again.

Now its back to rendering bricks, oh boy!