Energy Glance
Six oil and gas service companies and a prominent freight-forwarding company agreed to pay about $236 million in criminal and civil penalties in one of the largest corporate bribery cases ever to focus on a single industry, federal authorities said Thursday.
Most of the bribes were paid to circumvent local rules and regulations, allowing the oil service companies to import equipment and vessels into foreign countries, which included Angola, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Russia and Turkmenistan.
Halliburton Co. used flawed cement in BP Plc's doomed Gulf of Mexico well, which could have contributed to the blowout that sparked the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, a White House panel said on Thursday.
In papers everywhere we hear arguments such as the one that appeared recently in the Rochester (NY) Business Journal, in an article by economist Raymond J. Keating, under the heading "N.Y. is missing out on economic opportunity."
Nuclear watchdog groups say that an internal report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on fire safety at nuclear plants shows that regulators don't have enough information to know whether its new fire rules will ensure safety.
The federal pipeline safety agency doesn't keep copies of natural gas emergency plans in its offices. That makes them essentially invisible to the public and industry watchdogs. The Associated Press discovered the situation when it filed a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of every emergency plan for every natural gas and oil transmission pipeline in the U.S.
The strong winds off the Atlantic Ocean could become a cost-effective way to power much of the East Coast — especially North and South Carolina, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia, a new study released Tuesday says.
Tens of thousands of tons of potentially lethal radioactive waste have been piling up across the nation for more than a generation, but the federal government has yet to decide how to get rid of it permanently.
