Duke Energy's proposed $13.7 billion purchase of Progress Energy announced this morning could be a blow to Big Coal, which has ambitions to remain the planet's preeminent fuel for electric power. Both Duke and Progress have big ambitions for nuclear-fueled power plants, and Duke CEO Jim Rogers is among corporate America's loudest advocates for sharply slashed CO2 emissions.

Here is Rogers getting grilled by comedian Stephen Colbert:

Much in the climate change arena has gone topsy-turvy in the last two years. Back in 2009, China and India seemed to be among the main roadblocks to a global accord on reducing the emission of heat-trapping gases; now, China is aggressively lowering its growth of CO2 emissions absent corresponding cuts in the United States. Back then, it was an article of faith that the U.S. -- the world's second-largest CO2 emitter -- was going to put a price on carbon, and lead a global campaign against Arctic melting; among the leading such voices were corporate giants including ExxonMobil. Now, climate skepticism is ascendant, Republican leaders vow to halt Obama Administration policy to begin regulation of CO2 emissions, and corporate green-speak is heard much less in the halls of power, as Anne Mulkern reported at Greenwire.

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It seems much longer than eight months since the worst oil accident in history struck the Gulf of Mexico. Certainly BP wishes it was a lot further behind it, given that it is still working to raise $30 billion that it owes the U.S. government for a victims compensation fund and additional expected bills, with the potential for tens of billions more in penalties for the worst self-inflicted corporate disaster in recent memory (we can debate comparisons in the comments section below). The spill made a fall guy of Tony Hayward, ending his short career as CEO at the age of 53 and making him the second-straight BP chief executive after John Browne to collapse in a scandal (Beware, current BP CEO Bob Dudley: disasters can come in threes).

Yet eight months later, there has been almost no major fallout from the disaster for the oil industry, apart from a tighter production regime in the Gulf of Mexico: BP and everyone else continue to do business around the world, including in offshore zones. Which signals either a perception that BP handled the spill much better than the conventional wisdom suggests, or that Americans and the rest of the world are more inured to environmental disruption than they used to be. Most probably, it's the latter. But should that be the case? We discuss that question below.

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In my archive of all-time great oil pieces is a 2002 opus by Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times which, in addition to taking us deep into the Niger Delta, noted the country's rise from backwater to crucial U.S. strategic interest. Following 9/11, the Bush administration had launched a systematic effort to shift U.S. oil dependence from the Persian Gulf to Africa. From 15 percent of the U.S. supply, the Bush administration aimed for Africa to supply a full quarter of U.S. oil by 2012. Nigeria would be the biggest component, adding a million barrels a day to its production of 2 million barrels a day of among the lightest, most valuable petroleum on the market.

Today, the United States is nowhere near that target. Africa supplies about 18 percent of total U.S. oil imports, or just 11 percent of total consumption. Of that, Nigeria supplies only about 960,000 barrels a day, equivalent to 10 percent of U.S. imports, or 5 percent of total daily consumption.

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In the weeks before President Barack Obama took his oath of office, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson determined to get a march on the new, less greenhouse-gas-emitter-friendly world that he and almost everyone else believed was coming, in the form of some sort of carbon-trading system. Tillerson was so certain of facing this new set of circumstances that he went to Washington to push publicly for something that Exxon opposed constitutionally: A straightforward tax on carbon.

As we all know now, the political sausage machine on Capitol Hill chewed up cap and trade, and the conventional wisdom now is that if such a system ever does materialize, it may be decade or more down the road. So it's surprising to find that Tillerson's lobbying wasn't just a matter of short term political triage -- he actually believes this stuff.

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The rare earths imbroglio continues. The New York Times' Keith Bradsher has another report on the slowdown of rare-earth exports from China: This time, he wrote, the flow of the strategic elements has slowed to not just the United States but also Europe. The Obama Administration ordered an investigation into the report. Two weeks before the U.S. mid-term elections -- in which the dastardly Chinese are already emerging as a popular bogeyman -- the elements are likely to come up as a political issue.

Sanctions tighten on Iran. The United States succeeded in further tightening oil sanctions on Iran this week, when Japan's Inpex said it would join European companies and halt its relationship with Tehran, which Washington is attempting to push to the negotiating table over its nuclear development program. (The Iranian government, meanwhile, played down Inpex's announced withdrawal from development of the Azadegan natural gas field.) That now leaves China as the last major country with significant energy investments in Iran, John Pomfret reported in The Washington Post.

Did Britain just institute a carbon tax? Earlier this year, Britain's Department of Energy and Climate Change launched a carbon emissions reduction policy that would have levied a pollution charge -- about $22 per ton of carbon -- on Britain's 4,000 biggest energy users, then paid the money back to the same companies in the form of energy efficiency incentives. It was a revenue-neutral approach -- until Wednesday, when the government quietly decided to keep the money, on the order of $1.58 billion a year. David Roberts at Grist explains.

China braces for a flood of LNG. If you want to gauge how much liquefied natural gas a country plans on using in the coming years, look to the shipyards. Case in point: The Chinese shipbuilding company that has built all of China's LNG tankers to date is ramping up its tanker construction efforts in preparation for what it anticipates will be a quadrupling of LNG imports between now and 2015, one of the company's top executives told Bloomberg News on Thursday. China's LNG consumption, if it lives up to the current projections, will have ramifications far beyond the country's shores -- just ask the companies building pipelines in Alaska.

Another $1.5 billion for biofuels in the United States. After the collapse of efforts to pass cap-and-trade legislation and hopes fading for even more modest renewable energy legislation, these are not the best of times for the clean energy industry in Washington -- unless, of course, you're in the biofuels business. Reuters reports that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is throwing another $1.5 billion at the industry in an effort to meet congressionally mandated targets for the production of still-commercially-unproven advanced biofuels by 2022. As for the 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol -- a reliable source of teeth-grinding for Brazil's government and sugar cane industry -- Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says it's probably sticking around, though it's likely to be phased out in the future. File that in the "I'll believe it when I see it" folder.

Chevron drills deeper. Well, that didn't take long -- barely a week after the Obama administration lifted its moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Chevron announced Thursday that it would develop two fields in the Gulf estimated to contain some 500 million barrels of oil. The project is pegged at $7.5 billion, and would involve drilling wells deeper than BP's ill-fated Macondo operation. "In the end, the United States needs the oil and gas and other countries need the oil and gas, and some of the best places to explore are deepwater environments," Bobby Ryan, Chevron's vice president for global operations, told the New York Times' Clifford Krauss.

A few days ago, the United States responded to a United Steelworkers suit by announcing an investigation of China's alleged gargantuan subsidizing of its clean-energy industries -- something regarded by many countries, including China, as a strategic priority. Today we get China's apparent reply: Beijing is cutting off its exports of rare-earth minerals to the United States, according to the New York Times' Keith Bradsher.

The 17 rare-earth minerals are crucial to the manufacture of high-tech products such as advanced batteries and flat-screen televisions, and in military equipment such as missiles and jets. China mines about 95 percent of the world's rare earths.

The news comes the same day that China announced that it is further reducing the export of the minerals to all countries next year. In July, Beijing said it would reduce its rare earth exports by about 40 percent. Next year, it's set to reduce that volume by another 30 percent, according to another report by Bradsher.

The issue of rare earth availability has alarmed numerous companies and countries. Japan got cut off Sept. 21 after one of its naval cutters arrested a Chinese fisherman for ramming Japanese patrol boats. Since then, several companies have announced plans to accelerate the re-opening of rare earth mines in Australia, the United States, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, but bringing such projects to fruition can take years.

This latest move significantly escalates a steady increase in economic and trade moves by both countries. If confirmed, the Obama administration might have no choice but to reply with some similar action, particularly given the poisonous mid-term election atmosphere in the United States.

Is China still sore over the humiliation of tuna fisherman Zhang Qixiong? Is it China's 32 rare-earth metals exporters -- are they, as Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming suggests, so wound up over Japan in general that they have decided collectively to strangle Japan's electronics and hybrid-car industries, as Keith Bradsher and Edward Wong report at the New York Times?

China's ban on the export of the 17 so-called rare-earth metals -- indispensable as of now in the manufacture of high-tech products like wind turbines, advanced batteries and flat-screen TVs -- has now passed three weeks in length. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao says this isn't political: Beijing, he says, isn't attempting to demonstrate its dominance over Japan. That sounds right. Instead, this looks like standard economics.

What hasn't received much attention is that, while no rare-earth metals have gone -- at least legally -- to Japan since Sept. 21, China has continued to freely export finished products such as advanced magnets in which rare-earths are embedded.

Beijing Review has an interesting interview with Lin Donglu, of the Chinese Society of Rare Earths, and Wang Hongqian, of China's Foreign Engineering and Construction Co. In it, the two men discuss China's efforts to develop advanced rare-earth industries, and not be simply a raw-materials supplier to the world. They also cite western complaints about China's hardball incentives for western companies to relocate in China -- these companies are facing restrictions on rare earths that they can import, but are offered all the metals they wish, at lower prices, if they move their factories to China.

This may explain the China-Japan rare-earths standoff: Beijing is signaling more forcefully now that, if Japanese companies want broad access to rare earths, they should move to China, or buy their rare-earth components from Chinese companies.

Beijing is telling companies in the rest of the world the same thing: You could be next.

Tianjin climate talks get underway -- but does anyone care? A new round of international climate talks opened on Monday, as delegates from 177 countries met in the northeastern city of Tianjin for preliminary discussions on a carbon emissions agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire in 2012. The talks are to be followed by a more formal climate summit in Cancun set to open on November 29, and the Tianjin meeting was a chance for delegates to discuss the complex legal framework and cost estimates that will come with instituting a global emissions reduction scheme. The finger-pointing that plagued the abortive Copenhagen talks last December resurfaced, as Chinese officials accused developed countries of not doing enough to reduce their own carbon emissions and argued that those countries should accommodate the growth of emerging economies such as China. The conference stalled as Beijing repeatedly refused to discuss a global emissions reduction scheme, favoring a system of varying individual commitments. Although China has great ambitions in clean energy development, it has long been reluctant to adopt any globally-binding set of carbon reductions for fear of curbing its economic growth.

Shale gas boom could turn U.S. into exporter. The U.S. is continuing to experience a shale gas boom, as companies sunk $21 billion into the shale gas investments for the first half of 2010, according to a report by consultancy Wood Mackenzie. High-profile investments in gas have also come this week, as Barclays paid $1.15 billion for some of Chesapeake Energy's shale assets and General Electric announced its $3 billion acquisition of Dresser, which makes gas engines used in natural gas production. As new extractive technologies have made shale gas commercially viable, U.S. gas supplies have continued to grow ever larger, pushing prices down to some of their lowest levels in the last decade. But despite the adverse pressures of a domestic gas glut and low prices on U.S. gas production, companies are eager to enter the market for what they see as a potential growth prospect. As Sheila McNulty reports in the Financial Times, that growth could come increasingly from U.S. natural gas exports, as some companies are already looking to refit expensive liquefied natural gas import terminals for export. Natural gas exports would give a boost to U.S. gas producers by raising the price slightly at home and thus discouraging cutbacks in production. While natural gas prices in Asia remain high thanks to strong demand, U.S. gas exports could join those from Russia, Qatar, and Australia in bringing down world natural gas prices for years. The upside from this domestic gas glut? Lower prices could see gas continue to become a highly attractive and cleaner alternative to coal and oil as a power source, though admittedly, as McNulty writes on the FT's Energy Source blog, U.S. energy policy and infrastructure have a way to go before that happens. So for now, look for exports to be the path to profitability for U.S. gas producers.

First U.S. wind farm finally moves forward. The Cape Wind development off the coast of Massachusetts, the first U.S. offshore wind farm project, cleared the last regulatory hurdle this week nine years after it was submitted for approval, as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar signed the federal lease for the project on Wednesday. The project is expected to generate enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, but it had faced stiff opposition from wealthy landowners and local businesses on Cape Cod and neighboring islands. The Obama administration is expecting news of the project's green light is shore up its commitment to green energy, particularly after an accompanying announcement this week that the Interior Department has approved the first solar power plants to be constructed on federal land.

How the Senate energy bill was lost. Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker has a detailed and comprehensive piece out this week chronicling the failure of the Senate's climate change bill. According to Lizza, the Senate and the Obama administration had a golden opportunity to pass a comprehensive climate change bill in 2009 and early 2010, especially as bipartisan support in the Senate seemed likely. Sens. John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsay Graham had formed a working partnership to getting a bill passed. But the bill foundered as the administration's commitment to climate change took a backseat to healthcare reform, and the White House repeatedly gave up concessions -- such as an easing of offshore drilling restrictions in March -- that the three senators had planned on using as bargaining chips to attract Republican support. The bill was further strained by the influence of utility special interests, and as the political atmosphere ahead of the midterm elections turned increasingly partisan, the partnership at the heart of the bill ultimately disintegrated.

Oil continues rally to new highs this week. Crude oil remained above the $80 mark this week, reaching five-month highs above $83 a barrel on Wednesday and Thursday before declining late Thursday. Crude rebounded on Friday, currently trading at $82.56 per barrel in New York. The price climb has been driven primarily by a weak dollar, which hit a 15-year low against the Japanese yen this week. Contributing to the dollar's decline was speculation that the Federal Reserve would act soon to print more money in order to bolster the economy, a procedure known as quantitative easing. The release of the Labor Department's jobs report on Friday, which detailed no change in the unemployment rate for September 2010, only fed that speculation, lessening the appeal of the dollar and boosting the appeal of crude, which are denominated in dollars and become attractive when the currency weakens. As OPEC prepares to meet next week in Vienna, the cartel is unlikely to respond to the recent price rise by increasing production quotas.

Who is Vladimir Putin trying to impress with his various feats of machismo in recent months: The Russian populace, or his own inner circle?

In today' Moscow Times, Vladimir Frolov, a government relations consultant, argues that Putin's current road show is not aiming to return to the Kremlin. Newsweek's Owen Matthews stakes out a contrarian posture as well, writing that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is no longer simply Putin's protégé, but his own man -- and one who is definitely running for a second term, whether Putin likes it or not. Similarly, Charles Clover suggests in the Financial Times that the earnest Medvedev is a fashionable fellow, what with his insistently edgy notions of finally helping Russia make a true leap into modernization.

News loves to zag after zigging for awhile, and I myself continue to believe that Putin will decide the identity of Russia's next president, and that he will choose himself. But these writers by implication remind us of a much-disregarded fact of autocratic life: No strongman rules in a vacuum. They each have their own elite circle that they must bring along with them, using such tools as fear, charm, love and persuasion. Indeed, some of the most engaging leaders I've met have been autocrats: Pervez Musharraf, Najibullah, Heydar Aliyev, and Nursultan Nazarbayev among them. Colleagues who interviewed Ferdinand Marcos and Zia ul-Haq were bowled over by the charm.

In Putin's case, the tool of autocratic politics is the populism of the whale and tiger hunt.

We know Iran as a nuclear story -- Israel, the United States, and much of the rest of the West are convinced that Tehran is uncomfortably close to deploying a workable atomic weapon, while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delights in tweaking his detractors with, at turns, vows to continue the country's nuclear activities, and to attack Israel. The latest installment is a dust-up over access rights for international inspectors.

But Iran is also an energy story. The United States spent much time trying to prevent Iran from activating its long-in-the-works Bushehr nuclear power station, which, with Russian expertise, will begin to produce electricity in the next month or so.

Having lost that game, the Obama administration is working to shut down Iran's life-blood oil and gasoline complex, testing whether the Iranian government is prepared to sustain an economic body blow -- and thus risk local public support -- in order to preserve its presumed nuclear program. The Financial Times' Roula Khalaf reports that the U.S.-advanced sanctions are biting: Iran is being forced to stop making potentially crucial chemicals, and instead convert those plants to gasoline production. Likewise, Javier Blas reports in the FT that banking and shipping restrictions are making it harder for Tehran to sell its oil abroad.  

But let's face facts: Around the world, nuclear weapon capabilities play well to domestic audiences -- in India, Israel, Pakistan, and in Iran. So does confounding the desires of great powers. Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Khalaf that a plummet in oil prices under $50 a barrel might turn Iran's head, since it wouldn't be able to pay its bills. There is something to that -- Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez have become more agreeable negotiating partners when oil prices have dipped. But given Ahmadinejad's record, and his apparent support within the senior clergy, it's hard to see these measures resulting in a nuclear stand down.

Finally getting Russia to turn on Bushehr has been a key public relations development for Iran's leadership. I talked to Dan Byman, an Iran expert and my colleague at Georgetown University. "It showed [Iranians] that they are escaping from isolation," Byman told me. "It's something that you play up domestically."

So we have the continuing game of chicken. Iran says its nuclear efforts are peaceful; the Obama administration says "prove it," and meanwhile threatens to make the country go dark.

What is the thrust of BP's internal investigation on what went wrong at the Macondo oil well last April? That as the company has suggested from the beginning, it is only at fault in the sense of shared culpability. It's a risky strategy that badly backfired from a public relations standpoint -- by appearing to be pointing fingers elsewhere in order to escape blame, outgoing CEO Tony Hayward offended American tradition, in which sins are confessed, then forgiven. But BP is betting that its bigger threat is elsewhere, specifically in the courtroom. BP knows that Hayward lost the PR battle and the battle for hearts and minds in Washington last spring and summer; its black eye can't get any worse. As Ian Urbina writes in the New York Times, the company is aiming to reduce its legal exposure.

In the bare facts of what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, yesterday's report isn't materially different from a leaked version that we posted in June. In a nutshell, the well blew because of a perfect storm of faults. 

But it does signal with whom BP wishes to share the blame. BP knows that other investigative reports are under preparation, and by coming out of the gates with its version first, it gets to "shape the narrative," as the Financial Times writes in an editorial. The Wall Street Journal's Russell Gold suggests that, in the courtroom, BP intends to point its finger at a reliable punching bag, Halliburton, the contractor for the well's crucial cement job.

The stakes are high. BP, which has already paid out $8 billion in cleanup and other costs, may be on the hook for many more billions in legal judgments. That would be a burden to the company's ledger and, though it could bear the costs, it would like to tamp down the size wherever it can. But the risk is higher for others in the mix: Depending on what happens in the courtroom, Transocean and Anadarko could end up sold, bankrupt or both.

Greenland or bust! On Tuesday the U.K. exploration firm Cairn Energy revealed that it has discovered natural gas in Baffin Bay, just off the west coast of Greenland. It's too early to tell whether the area contains commercial quantities of oil and natural gas, but the find is encouraging. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that the waters off the island could contain as much as 50 billion barrels of oil and gas, while melting ice has suddenly made a once-inhospitable area more viable for offshore drilling. Edinburgh-based Cairn is optimistic that the basin could be a major find, and other energy companies have hurried north to apply for exploration licenses. One company that won't be joining them is BP, whose less-than-stellar recent reputation with offshore drilling has forced it to back off. But despite mounting environmental groups' opposition to the drilling and the presence of a renegade ice island floating south, energy companies are likely to continue to flock to what could be the next frontier in oil and gas.

Nigeria's electricity privatization gamble.  Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan announced yesterday that the country plans to privatize the state-owned power monopoly and attract foreign investment in the electricity sector. Electricity demand in Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, has always strained the country's inadequate national grid thanks to heavily-subsidized prices, and power outages are common. Abuja hopes to drum up some $10 billion in foreign investment to make the necessary upgrades, and already investors from Canada, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, and China have expressed interest. In keeping with his other energy reform efforts, President Jonathan is trying to boost his reform credentials as his party heads into national elections in January 2011. Overcoming Nigeria's chronic power crisis would be a critical step forward in the government's pursuit of growth and development.

An unlikely partner in drilling safety. Lee Hunt, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors, said on Wednesday that he would welcome Cuban state oil company Cubapetroleo (Cupet) to join the organization as "a member of the international drilling community." Hunt and other association officials were visiting Havana this week as Cuba prepares to drill a series of test wells in its section of the Gulf of Mexico over the next two years. Cupet's drilling partners in the project are all members of the industry group, which wants to bring in the Cuban company to ensure that drilling safety and technical standards are met. But the Houston-based organization will have to secure approval from the Obama administration first. While there are no signs that the 50-year old U.S. trade embargo will be lifted any time soon, informal industry cooperation over drilling safety standards could be a modest first step towards some normalization of commercial relations with Cuba.

Drilling ban's diminished impact. Concerns about the Obama administration's extended moratorium on offshore drilling may have been premature, according to John Broder and Clifford Krauss at The New York Times. After much protest from drillers and supply firms, who argued that the ban would endanger thousands of industry jobs and drive drilling from U.S. waters, the impact of the moratorium has been milder than expected. This is because oil companies have used the drilling freeze to perform needed maintenance and upgrades to their rigs, while concentrating more on onshore drilling. Job losses have been far below what the industry claimed they would be. Administration officials have also repeatedly hinted that the ban might be lifted before its November 30 expiration date. Meanwhile, the BP spill seems to have had little to no effect on the progress of other global offshore drilling projects, although other governments have announced new regulations and safety reviews.

China and South Africa ink nuclear energy deal. China and South Africa announced a series of high-profile business deals on Tuesday, one of which could see China National Nuclear Corp. construct a nuclear-power plant in South Africa. Talks are under way with the Chinese state-owned nuclear company to import nuclear technology to South Africa, while a banking partnership between the two countries would finance any joint nuclear efforts. The deals come as South African president Jacob Zuma visited Beijing this week to promote commercial relations with Beijing, South Africa's top trading partner. China has been trying to position itself as a leading exporter of nuclear technology, while continuing its broader strategy of strengthening its presence in Africa.

Could China push the world into alternative fuels? The Council on Foreign Relations' Geo-Graphics blog has an illuminating post this week depicting the potentially sobering effect of China's insatiable demand for oil. According to the chart, once a country's per capita income hits $15,000, oil consumption growth tends to increase exponentially. So far Chinese oil consumption has shown no signs of slowing down, but its per capita oil consumption remains less than 0.1 barrel per person per day, compared to the nearly 0.7 barrels per person per day by the United States. But as China approaches the $15,000 GDP per capita mark, world oil supplies could be in for a shock, as the projected increase in demand would necessitate unrealistic increases in global oil output. If China follows this consumption pattern, alternative energy sources may be looking like less of an alternative and more of a necessity.

Oil prices rebound, gas moves to new low. Crude oil prices were staring at a third straight week of declines before rebounding towards the end of the week, closing at $75.17 Friday in New York. Plummeting U.S. housing purchases and continued high U.S. stockpiles pushed oil prices to an 11-week low of $70.76 on Wednesday, before a reduction in jobless claims, a weaker dollar, and Friday's speech by Fed chair Ben Bernanke renewed confidence in crude. But a weak U.S. economy remains the primary concern for oil analysts, and reports of cooling Chinese oil demand are also likely to encourage bearish sentiments. Accordingly, OPEC has already announced a 0.3 percent cut in crude shipments. High stockpiles of natural gas also caused that commodity to take a beating this week, as prices fell to their lowest levels in nearly a year. And gasoline prices are also in a downward spiral, which should provide some added relief for drivers getting away this Labor Day weekend.

BP's Libyan drilling delay. BP moved yesterday to delay the starting date for its planned deepwater drilling project off the coast of Libya. The project, which had been scheduled to begin within a number of weeks, has now been put off to an unspecified date later this year. BP says the company is delaying work because it is still finalizing preparations, which could mean that the company is wary of European fears that a Macondo-like well blowout could occur in the Mediterranean. But the delay also comes in the wake of allegations that BP's ties to Libya played a role in the Scottish government's decision to release convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi last year, and after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on the subject two weeks ago.

Energy innovation from an unexpected source. On Sunday Abu Dhabi announced that it would install "smart grid" electricity meters in every home in the emirate this year, while at the same time creating a subsidy system for solar panels. The subsidy is expected to create a $2 billion market for solar panels over the next decade, which the emirate's government hopes will attract international investment in the technology, driving down the costs of the technology and encouraging local solar entrepreneurs. Abu Dhabi's move towards efficient electricity-generation may seem surprising, coming as it does from a country with vast petroleum reserves. But the United Arab Emirates has big plans to expand its current oil output, and part of this plan involves freeing more oil for export from the country's burgeoning demand for electricity -- which also explains the construction of four nuclear reactors there by a Korean firm.

Opening up, and paying up. It was a good week for federal energy regulators, as the new financial regulation law brought unexpected consequences for energy companies. On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal revealed that last month's Dodd-Frank law contained a provision requiring U.S. oil companies to disclose all payments made to foreign governments in the development of energy and mineral resources. The transparency measure was quietly inserted into the bill, but it has provoked much noise from the industry, which argues that the law will put them at a disadvantage to foreign competitors when vying for exploration and development contracts. Meanwhile, BP agreed to pay the Occupational Safety and Health Administration a record $50.6 million fine yesterday in response to charges from OSHA that the oil giant had neglected to upgrade the safety conditions at its Texas City, Tex. refinery, where a 2005 explosion killed fifteen people and injured nearly 200. These were both rare victories for advocates of tighter energy regulation, whose efforts to create a more far-reaching regulatory environment for oil were frustrated by the Senate's decision to punt on an energy bill last week.

Sanctions take their toll. Iran is suspending development on two liquefied natural gas projects, forcing the country to scale back its once-ambitious plans to become a leading exporter in the global LNG market. Officials of the National Iranian Oil Company cited costs and complexity as the reasons for the suspension, but the move comes weeks after the United States and European Union introduced tightened sanctions on Tehran. The sanctions have closed off Iranian access to the technology necessary to move forward on its LNG projects; expertise in the sector is heavily concentrated in Western energy firms. News of the suspension comes as a report from the International Energy Agency revealed that Iran's gasoline imports have been hit hard by the sanctions-despite possessing some of the world's largest oil and gas reserves, Iran lacks the refining capacity to meet domestic fuel demand. Although Tehran has repeatedly denied the impact of external sanctions, the LNG project suspension may be a grudging acceptance of the effect that the sanctions have had on the country.

Saudi Aramco: What, me worry? Khalid F. Al-Falih, the president and CEO of Saudi Aramco, dismissed concerns about peak oil as "baseless" at the Oxford Energy Forum in the United Kingdom on Tuesday. Citing geological evidence and analyses, Al-Falih argued that the world's sources of oil and natural gas have remained plentiful, and that with the proper technology, policy decisions, and economic and regulatory environment, these resources can be successfully developed. Saudi Aramco, the world's largest exporter of crude oil, has repeatedly brushed aside the threat of peak oil in the past, arguing that such concerns have only contributed to price volatility in world oil markets.

Oil markets still a roller-coaster ride. Oil prices fell back to earth this week, after touching 12-week highs last week, to settle at around $76 a barrel yesterday in New York. The Federal Reserve's announcement on Tuesday that it would hold interest rates at record lows, along with a rise in U.S. applications for unemployment benefits, caused investors to turn sour on crude. Meanwhile OPEC released its global oil demand forecast today, predicting a 1.2 percent increase in demand for the next year, driven by rising consumption in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Last week I wrote that oil prices may be heading south thanks to a conflict between Asian growth and weak U.S. demand, and this week's news seems to confirm that oil will be hanging around the $70-$80 price range for the time being.

If you want to find a poster child for the idea of the resource curse, you don't have to look much further than Nigeria: A country whose endemic corruption, driven by the largest oil industry in Africa, is the stuff of legend. Nigeria and Nigerian oil, however, are at a crossroads: The country's lawmakers are on the home stretch of an ambitious effort to remake -- for better or worse -- the whole industry.

William Wallis at the Financial Times reports that Abuja is making a serious push -- legislators are taking the unheard-of-in-Washington measure of delaying their August recess -- to pass the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), which would restructure the national oil company, raise royalties on foreign oil companies operating in Nigeria, and encourage local Nigerian oil operators to play a larger role in the country's oil and gas industry, the largest in Africa. The stakes for the PIB are high, reviving an oil reform effort that had stalled for years and coming with national elections on the horizon in January 2011. But Diezani Allison-Madueke, Nigeria's oil minister, told Reuters in late July that she is confident that the bill will pass the National Assembly by the end of August.

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