Big Oil, Big Loser As Russia Meddles
Wanna know why Washington's ready to take us to the brink of World War III?
Big Oil, Big Loser As Russia Meddles
By Dimitra DeFotis
Barron's, March 4, 2014
Even if the West doesn’t place economic sanctions on Russia as it removes troops from Ukraine, border hostilities highlight the potential disruption of hydrocarbon deliveries bound for Europe.
That could mean big headaches for big energy companies invested in the exploration, production, processing and delivery chain.
Oil-and-gas pipelines criss-cross Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, and Russia supplies a third of the European Union’s oil and natural gas, writes Philip Adams, a senior investment grade bond analyst at Gimme Credit, an independent corporate bond research service. The net result: expect collateral damage in related corporate bond spreads, Adams says.
Adams’ partial list of potential losers:
BP (BP) : the highest profile potential loser. It owns 19.75% of Russian energy giant Rosneft, which accounted a third of BP’s production in the fourth quarter. Sanctions that inhibit oil and gas flows to Europe, or banking/capital flows, would “hit Rosneft and BP early and hard.” An offset: there could be an uptick in demand for a pipeline 30% owned and operated by BP because it transports Azerbaijan oil through Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean — a southern route avoiding Georgia and Ukraine.
Chevron (CVX) pipeline investments could be stymied. It also signed a 50-year agreement to explore for and develop oil and gas in western Ukraine, involving up to $10 billion of investment. “A Russian takeover spikes that deal,” Adams says.
Oilfield services companies Halliburton (HAL), Baker Hughes (BHI), and Weatherford International (WFT) all do business in Russia that could be prohibited if it is labeled a rogue nation.
The crisis in Ukraine and Russia’s tactics make U.S. assets look more secure and more valuable: some U.S. refiners that could export fuel, utility holding companies that could export liquefied natural gas, and related pipeline companies could see even more benefits, longer-term, from the North American fracking and horizontal drilling boom. But approval of the TransCanada (TRP) Keystone XL pipeline is a necessary piece of that equation, Adams writes.
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http://blogs.barrons.com/stockstowatchtoday/2014/03/04/big-oil-big-loser-as-russia-meddles/?mod=BOLBlog
It's the oil. It's always the oil. It's the only thing they know. It's extraction's currency of exchange, from Teapot Dome to Vietnam to Iran-Contra to the illegal and immoral Iraq invasion. It's the precious. The only thing that matters, money.
= new reply since forum marked as read
The U.S. gunboats were on the Yangtze to protect missionaries and Standard Oil's shipments from pirates.
Four years before Pearl Harbor:
During the battle for Nanking in the Sino-Japanese War, the U.S. gunboat Panay is attacked and sunk by Japanese warplanes in Chinese waters. The American vessel, neutral in the Chinese-Japanese conflict, was escorting U.S. evacuees and three Standard Oil barges away from Nanking, the war-torn Chinese capital on the Yangtze River. After the Panay was sunk, the Japanese fighters machine-gunned lifeboats and survivors huddling on the shore of the Yangtze. Two U.S. sailors and a civilian passenger were killed and 11 personnel seriously wounded, setting off a major crisis in U.S.-Japanese relations.
Although the Panay's position had been reported to the Japanese as required, the neutral vessel was clearly marked, and the day was sunny and clear, the Japanese maintained that the attack was unintentional, and they agreed to pay $2 million in reparations. Two neutral British vessels were also attacked by the Japanese in the final days of the battle for Nanking.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/uss-ipanayi-sunk-by-japanese
John McCain, original Neocon and watercarrier for the oil lobby, to Putin
Rec'd
Oh well. Too bad. So sad.
Poppy Bush, when he swore he wasn't CIA, was scouting the country out for Big Oil.
CIA Helped Bush Senior In Oil Venture
By Russ Baker
WhoWhatWhy.com, Jan 7, 2007
Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a ‘real shocker.’
But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush’s oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.
According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush’s original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The ’75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.
“Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine’s role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.
It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.
While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father’s connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit – thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported.
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http://whowhatwhy.com/2007/01/07/cia-bush-senior-oil-venture/
No wonder Karl Rove thinks the guy is crazy.
...and joined with Al Qaeda ("The Rebels"
in the Libyan Civil War.
It is frightening epiphany to realize that NATO has become the Enforcement Arm for the Global Corporations.
The campaign to undercut the emerging Transparent Populist Democracies in Latin America is especially egregious.
For a country that pays so much lip service to the words "freedom" and "democracy",
you would think that we would have more respect for the REAL thing.
But NO!
We remain committed to funding one of the last remaining Death Squad Police State Oligarchies (Colombia).
One of the issues upon which the Democratic Party and the Republican Party openly agree is the need to DEMONIZE & CONDEMN and fund the overthrow of the Populist government in Venezuela, and all the other emerging democracies in South America.
The predictable results of the openly hostile position is driving these emerging democracies and their emerging markets straight into the open arms of Russia, China, and Iran.
How STUPID does it have to get? 
In Venezuela,
The POOR are celebrating,
and the RICH are protesting.
I would love to see that here.
VIVA Democracy!
...because WE outnumber THEM.
