Energy Bangla

Although some US oil companies are struggling with low oil prices, a new wave of innovation is hitting the oil patch, allowing for a significant reduction in drilling costs. A variety of different improvements in production are starting to show up at all levels across the industry from small firms to oil majors. Statoil for example recently noted that it is experimenting with different types of sand and chemicals to... »

Oil prices have rebounded strongly since March. The benchmark WTI prices soared by more than 36 percent in two months, and Brent has jumped by more than 25 percent. There is a newfound bullishness in the oil markets – net long positions on Brent crude have hit multi-year highs in recent weeks on a belief that US supply is on its way down. That was backed up by recent EIA... »

Underground disposal of waste water produced from oil and natural gas wells has been blamed for triggering thousands of small earthquakes in Oklahoma and a number of other U.S. states since 2009. Heightened seismic activity corresponds closely with the timeframe and location of increased drilling and hydraulic fracturing across the southwest United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (“Incorporating induced seismicity in the 2014 United States national seismic hazard... »

Primary Energy Crude oil imports declined by 1.92% in November’14 compared to the previous year. However, it rose by 5.9% in December’14 and by 416% in January’15 compared to the previous year. Imports of petroleum products increased in November’14, followed by decline in December’14 and January’15. Gas production has been showing an increasing trend from November’14 to January’15. Chevron accounted for about 49 percent of gas production in Bangladesh in... »

Last night the EIA once again capitulated on the myth that rig counts don’t matter and the productivity of wells would largely offset, leaving the industry on a continuous path to higher output. The current consensus of 500,000 B/D additional growth in 2015 US production now appears very much at risk. Look how far we have come, folks, from all that media hysteria this past year. Yesterday, Reuters even wrote... »

It looks like a quiz contest of multiple choices. What is the rate of growth Bangladesh will attain at the end of the current fiscal year? (A) 7.3 percent as targeted, (B) 5.6 percent as the World Bank has projected, (C) 6.5 percent as the planning minister has forecast; or (D) close to 7 percent as the finance minister has expressed his hope? The answers could also be multiple, interestingly,... »

The upstream oil and gas industry is not a black hole. There’s no mystery wrapped in an enigma here. There are a lot of meetings with engineers, chemists and geologists. There’s a constantly evolving learning curve. And then there’s all the regulations and compliance. But all-in-all it’s pretty straight forward, that is, until the media gets a hold of it. That’s when it becomes complicated. It’s as though we are... »

The newest Mercedes autonomous car looks like a car on the outside but like a lounge on the inside, with four swivel seats facing each other in a multimedia bubble of padded leather and walnut veneer. The F 015 ‘Luxury in Motion’ concept car unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year is completely self-driving but still has a steering wheel and brake if you want... »

Lest we be too quick to forget whence we came, America is now 9-months into lower gasoline prices, which started their swoon the week of June 30, 2015 from a lofty national average just under $3.70, tumbling almost every subsequent week before bottoming and bouncing from $2.02 the end of January, according to gasbuddy.com. It is estimated that for every penny gas goes down, consumers collectively save $1 billion. Therefore,... »

Proper price and market structure is the key for ensuring the uninterrupted quality supply of any product. If an appropriate commercial framework of business is not in place, market distortion, price fluctuations and supply disruptions are bound to happen. The energy market in Bangladesh is no exception. International Gas Union (IGU) in its survey of wholesale gas price found that 43 percent of the total 3480 bcm gas consumed in... »