Energy futures wavered, hesitating on a drive to $100 a barrel Wednesday after the government reported that oil inventories fell unexpectedly last week, but that supplies at a closely watched oil terminal in the Midwest rose for the first time in weeks.

Inventories of distillates including heating oil dropped more than expected, and crude imports fell.

Light, sweet crude for January delivery rose 55 cents to $98.58 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange but alternated frequently between gains and losses.

Earlier they had risen as high as $99.29 a barrel in electronic trading to break the previous intraday record of $98.62 set earlier this month.
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Flags flew at half-staff across Ukraine on Tuesday as cemetery workers dug graves for the victims of the country’s worst mining disaster — a methane blast deep underground that killed at least 88 coal miners.

Funeral preparations were under way as hopes faded for miners still missing two days after the explosion at the sprawling Zasyadko mine in the eastern city of Donetsk, the heart of the ex-Soviet nation’s coal industry.

The bodies of 88 miners have been found, the Emergency Situations Ministry said, making it the deadliest in a long string of mining disasters in Ukraine since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. A March 2000 explosion at a coal mine in the neighboring Luhansk region killed 81.
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The building of the UK’s first coal-fired power station for nearly 30 years is likely to move a step closer as Medway Council discusses the plans.

E.ON UK wants to build two new cleaner coal units and demolish an existing power station at Kingsnorth, near Rochester, in Kent.

It says the new power station will be 20% cleaner - the equivalent of taking half a million cars off the road.

But objector Greenpeace says the power station is “dinosaur technology”.

The council will discuss the planning application, submitted last December, on Wednesday night.

It has received nearly 9,000 objections, more than 8,000 of them in the form of e-mails, postcards and letters in standard Greenpeace wording. Read more » »

An underground coal fire in remote northwest China that has raged unchecked for more than 50 years has finally been put out, state media reported on Wednesday.

More than 12.43 million tonnes of coal had been consumed in the fire and an estimated 651 million tonnes saved at the Terak field in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang autonomous region, the Coalfield Fire Fighting Project Office was quoted as saying.

Often smoldering in coal seams on or just below the surface, the fires have shaped the landscape of Xinjiang for millennia.
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Sarissa Resources, Inc. (SRSR) announced that it has acquired a Uranium/Copper mineral property in the Elliot Lake Camp in Albanel Township, situated in Northern Ontario. This property represents approximately 480 acres of land. The property is along an identified trend. Ben Fuschino, CEO, comments, “This property seems to be the last available piece of mining land available in this established uranium/copper/gold trend, and we, at Sarissa, are very lucky to have acquired this piece of land. This will be my last acquisition before Scott Keevil takes over the CEO position on December 1.”

Oklahoma City-based Bronco Drilling Co. is making its first international foray, and the destination is Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.

The deal, announced this week, is another sign that U.S. investment is broadening in a nation once considered a pariah by the United States.

Multinationals rushed into oil-rich Libya when President Bush lifted restrictions that had barred oil companies from doing business there for nearly two decades. Companies like Bronco, which operates its drilling rigs in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado and North Dakota, now appear ready to take a chance as well.
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Sunflower Electric Power Corp. filed a pair of lawsuits Friday seeking to overturn the state’s top environmental regulator’s denial of an air-quality permit for two proposed coal-fired power plants in southwest Kansas.

Sunflower filed one lawsuit in the Kansas Court of Appeals and another in Finney County District Court. Both seek to overturn a decision by Rod Bremby, Kansas’ secretary of health and environment, to deny the permit for the $3.6 billion project.
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Government of India has decided to make a joint allocation of Rampia and DIP side of Rampia non-coking coal blocks in the State of Orissa in favour of Lanco and five other companies so as to meet their share of coal requirements.

Lanco’s share of the coal reserves would enable setting up of a power plant with a generating capacity of 1,000 MW. The Government has requested the allottees to decide on the modalities for the allotment and operation of the mine within a month, the release said.
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At 66, one of the nation’s most prominent climate-change scientists says he’s more interested in finding solutions than placing blame for a warming planet.

One key solution, physicist James Hansen said Friday: No more coal-fired power plants like the one Duke Energy plans to expand 50 miles west of Charlotte.

Hansen is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. He’s also outspoken about the need to stabilize levels in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, which is released when coal, natural gas and oil are burned. Most climate scientists link those greenhouse gases to a warming planet.
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New Zealand’s Greymouth Petroleum Holdings Ltd has charged into South American oil exploration with a hiss and a roar, taking the most exploration blocks in Chile’s Magallanes petroleum permit round.

Greymouth acquired permits for four of the five blocks on which it bid in Magallanes Basin and committed sto pend $US107 million ($NZ143 million) in three exploration phases, Business News Americas reported.
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