The world according to Rex Tillerson: What are we to make of the CEO of ExxonMobil, who in a speech lasting just over an hour managed to tarnish journalists covering his industry as "lazy," the public as "illiterate," and critics as "manufacturers of fear"?  As for worries about global warming, Exxon's Rex Tillerson suggested they relax about rising seas and disappearing agriculture -- "we will adapt," he said.

Cynics might say, ‘What should one expect from ExxonMobil'? But if so, they would not have been listening to Tillerson since he became CEO six years ago, a period in which he has been much more measured: In flat, evenly delivered and nuanced language, the 60-year-old native Texan has softened Exxon's sharpest and most-criticized edges, most conspicuously repudiating its funding of a clutch of scholars whose tracts -- challenging conventional climate science -- have been seized upon by global warming critics as evidence of a hoax. So was his speech Wednesday before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York simply a bad hair day? Or are we essentially watching a reversion to the days of Exxon's abrasive former CEO, Lee Raymond? Here, watch the video yourself:

The last time we witnessed such a philosophical lurch by Exxon was in January 2009, when Barack Obama was about to take the oath of office, and the sense of Washington politics was the inevitability of a federal cap on carbon emissions. Explaining explicitly that he sensed this political shift, Tillerson appeared at the Wilson Center in Washington, and announced that Exxon now accepted climate science. As an ameliorative, Tillerson proposed that emissions of heat-trapping gases be discouraged through the use of a carbon tax. It was after this speech that Exxon stopped funding hoax die-hards.

Exxon did not respond to two emails seeking to plumb its latest thinking. But with this week's talk, which I describe at EnergyWire, Tillerson seems to comes full circle. Look for the company to pour its lobbying might into campaigns that twin climate adaptation with head-long development of American oil and gas resources.

Go to the Jump for the rest of Rex Tillerson, and more of the Wrap.

Is Barack Obama sufficiently dirty to win re-election? Not according to presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who says the president is too spic and span.

Calculating that clean energy is passé among Americans more concerned about jobs and their own pocketbooks, Romney is gambling that he can tip swing voters his way by embracing dirtier air and water if the tradeoff is more employment and economic growth.

Romney's gamble is essentially a bet on the demonstrated disruptive potency of shale gas and shale oil, which over the last year or so have shaken up geopolitics from Russia to the Middle East and China. Now, Romney and the GOP leadership hope they will have the same impact on U.S. domestic politics, and sweep the former Massachusetts governor into the White House with a strong Republican majority in Congress.

A flood of new oil and natural gas production in states such as North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas is changing the national and global economies. U.S. oil production is projected to reach 6.3 million barrels a day this year, the highest volume since 1997, the Energy Information Agency reported Tuesday. In a decade or so, U.S. oil supplies could help to shrink OPEC's influence as a global economic force. Meanwhile, a glut of cheap U.S. shale gas has challenged Russia's economic power in Europe and is contributing to a revolution in how the world powers itself.

But Romney and the GOP assert that Obama is slowing the larger potential of the deluge, and is not up to the task of turning it into what they say ought to be a gigantic jobs machine. The president's critics say an unfettered fossil fuels industry could produce 1.4 million new jobs by 2030. They believe that American voters won't be too impressed with Obama's argument that he is leading a balanced energy-and-jobs approach that includes renewable fuels and electric cars.

The GOP's oil-and-jobs campaign -- in April alone, 81 percent of U.S. political ads attacking Obama were on the subject of energy, according to Kantar Media, a firm that tracks political advertising -- is a risk that could backfire. Americans could decide that they prefer clean energy after all. Or, as half a dozen election analysts and political science professors told me, energy -- even if it seems crucial at this moment in time -- may not be a central election issue by November.

Yet if the election is as close as the polls suggest, the energy ads could prove a pivotal factor. "Advertising is generally not decisive. Advertising matters at the margins. ... But ask Al Gore if the margin matters," said Ken Goldstein, president of the Campaign Media Analysis Group at Kantar Media. "This is looking like an election where the margin may matter."

Just months after an enormous discovery of natural gas off the coast of Israel, a local company has reported another potentially big strike -- an estimated 1.4 billion barrels of oil, in addition to more natural gas. The company, Israel Opportunity Energy Resources, says it will start drilling by the end of the year. All of a sudden, Israel has found itself a focus of the world's hydrocarbon interest.

Energy experts are tittering about a prodigious new golden age of oil and gas in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Israel and Cyprus could become substantial oil and natural gas exporters, in addition to some other surprising places including French Guiana, Kenya, North Dakota, and Somalia. All in all, say increasingly mainstream projections, the world is moving into a period of petroleum abundance, and not the scarcity that most industry hands embraced just months ago. Plus, the United States, or at least North America, may be on the cusp of energy independence while OPEC's days of über-influence are numbered.

What these experts have not said, however, is that while this new golden age may indeed shake up the currently rich and powerful and create new regional forces, it could also accelerate the swamping of the planet in melted Arctic ice. So much new oil may flood the market that crude and gasoline prices might moderate and lessen consumer incentives to economize. "In the absence of U.S. leadership, I tend to agree with NASA's James Hansen that it is 'game over for the planet,'" Peter Rutland, a professor at Wesleyan University, told me in an email exchange.

This unspoken flaw in the golden-age scenario suggests it might not unfold so smoothly. The projected turnaround of oil's sagging fortunes may indeed herald economic salvation for the U.S. and global economies. But the environmental consequences could also trip up its full realization.

One of the most consequential energy decisions on the Obama Administration's plate isn't one typically discussed in the election-year hot house -- whether to expand drilling, allow the expansion of a pipeline for Canadian oil sands, or to throw clean-tech entrepreneurs to the sharks.

It is whether to more fully open the floodgates of the U.S. natural gas boom on the world by permitting greater exports of shale gas. The appearance of large volumes of U.S. shale gas on the global market could rattle geostrategy and markets from Russia, to Europe, China and the Middle East.

Shale gas drillers -- saddled with a glut of gas, and fire-sale prices -- are pushing hard for permission to build liquefied natural as terminals and export some of their supply, perhaps 60 billion cubic meters a year, especially to Asia.

In addition, thirsty nations are on America's doorstep. Japan is most insistently lobbying the White House to open up U.S. gas exports, reports the Wall Street Journal's Tennille Tracy. The reason is the need to compensate for its loss of nuclear-power production since last year's Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown. Others wanting U.S. gas include India and South Korea.

But a Japanese Trade Ministry official told Tracy that he expects no decision until after the November election. The reason is politics -- a number of economists are calling cheap gas a savior for a U.S. manufacturing revival, perhaps even the harbinger of a new industrial revolution. So if you start exporting the gas, and spark higher domestic prices, you may jeopardize this potential opportunity to revitalize American industry. President Obama would be accused by his critics of another job-squandering demonstration of economic incompetence.

Yet the chances are that the U.S. will end up with higher prices whatever the case. This is because drillers will not forever produce at high rates for $2.50 per 1,000 cubic feet; they will slow or shut down production from some fields, and the resulting drop in supply will send the price higher.

This is at it should be. To the degree that the frackers get their act together environmentally as suggested by the International Energy Agency, the global availability of shale gas could assist the resolution of numerous global conundra -- the problem of carbon buildup in the atmosphere; of Europe's over-reliance on Russian gas; of increasing Chinese restiveness with coal pollution; not to mention of Western manufacturing competitiveness. If there is a large, long-term shift to hybrid electric cars, oil demand could drop, and shake up the economic calculus in the Middle East.

Charles Ebinger of the Brookings Institution told me that U.S. exports will send up domestic gas prices at the margin -- "The anticipation of more export projects would lead to people lining up reserves to support them," he said.

But ultimately, the big impact will come with an industrial embrace of more natural gas, and a greater shift by U.S. utilities to the conversion of large coal-fired power plants to natural gas. Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations agrees. The volume suggested for export is "less than 10 percent of current U.S. production," Levi told me.

Apart from the entertainment value, what is the big deal about the saga of Aubrey McClendon, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy, and his use of the company as a piggy bank? The big deal is that, more than any single individual apart from the innovator George Mitchell, McClendon is responsible for the shale gas boom that is shaking up geopolitics. Of course, McClendon's hijinx do not change the geopolitical shakeup, but they are a window into the type of personalities who make up the wildcat boom (pictured above, McClendon, left, owns the Oklahoma City Thunder professional basketball team along with Clayton Bennett, right). As with most such revelations, the kernels and sometimes the whole kit-and-kaboodle are detailed in the fine print of a company's annual 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The thing is, few people bother to read such material -- apart that is from the folks over at footnoted.org, whose whole business is to do so. The footnoted folks have been talking about McClendon for awhile now (such as here, here and -- from today's Website -- here). I asked footnoted's Theo Francis for some insight into Chesapeake. His reply follows.

 

O&G: What could and should a Chesapeake investor, given an ordinary read of the company's 10-K annual reports, have known about Aubrey McClendon's compensation package, perks and financial dealings in recent years? As a followup, if that same investor elected to dig deeper and follow the trail of citations, what would he or she have been able to know?

Theo Francis: Piecing it together can take some work and patience, but it's there, mostly in the annual proxy filing, with updates scattered across other filings over the course of a year.

A snapshot of McClendon's compensation in 2011 (primarily from an April 30 amendment to the company's 10-K filing) illustrates what's available: Salary of $975,000; a $1.95 million discretionary bonus -- meaning it isn't based on any kind of performance measures, but just on the board's general sense of how well he's done; $13.6 million in stock awards; and $1.3 million in perks and retirement-plan contributions. Those perks are telling too: $500,000 in free personal trips on company aircraft (on top of another $650,000 in jet rides for which he reimbursed the company), $250,000 in personal accounting services provided by company employees (about which more in a moment), and $121,570 in personal security benefits. Total for 2011: $17.9 million. Over the last three years, McClendon's compensation has added up to more than $57 million. Plus, Chesapeake doesn't even count some perks, because there's ostensibly no incremental cost to the company, including for an unknown number of tickets to sporting events. McClendon has also built up $7.5 million in a deferred-compensation plan, a kind of IOU from the company.

Which brings us to the related-party transactions, the ones that the company did disclose: Buying McClendon's map collection for $12.1 million in 2008 (a transaction that was ultimately unwound after a lawsuit); paying the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team, in which McClendon personally owns a 19.2% stake; $2.9 million to $4.1 million a year for more than a decade for stadium naming rights, plus another $36 million over 12 years for sponsorship and advertising costs; and $4.6 million on tickets and games in 2011-12. There's also the board's decision in 2009 to ease the stock-ownership requirement and front McClendon $75 million toward his investments in the company's drilling operations, after he had to sell pretty much all his Chesapeake shares in a margin call the year before.

And then, of course, there's the long-standing "Founder Well Participation Program," which allowed McClendon to invest alongside Chesapeake in its drilling operations, and which is what's at the heart of the current series of embarrassments for the company. The disclosure about the program in last year's proxy was 1,500 words, which sounds like a lot, and there is a fair amount of detail: How the program works (very generally), why the board does it (with extra business clichés) and so on, as well as an estimate of the present value of McClendon's interests in the wells ($308 million at the time) and a table showing annual revenues, capital and operating expenditures, along with cash-flow from the program for McClendon. But there was an awful lot that wasn't disclosed. Since the original Reuters report, the news of an informal SEC inquiry, the company's decision to wind down the well participation program, and so on, the company has produced a lot more information about the program, McClendon's borrowing and other details, in a series of filings and statements.

The bottom line, I think, for any reasonable outside observer -- and I'm talking about before the Reuters bombshell  -- is that Chesapeake feels like a company run by McClendon, for McClendon and his buddies. As long as the company delivered for shareholders, there was a good chance that things could proceed with only minimal reforms for quite a while. But there's very little sense here that these people ever stopped and thought, ‘You know what, we're playing with other people's money; maybe we should rein it in a little.'

And as we've seen time and again over the years, that certainly sets the stage for a revelation like the one we got from Reuters.

 

Same framework -- what went undisclosed that we've learned about in recent weeks?

Quite a bit, and that's why you've seen shareholders react so badly.

For me, Chesapeake had the feel of an insouciant bad boy: It seemed like it was being pretty brash and up-front about its extremes, and that shareholders were for the most part shrugging it off. We always worry about what's not disclosed, and on one level, when a company flouts conventions to the degree that Chesapeake has, you have more to worry about (with Enron being perhaps the ultimate modern-day example). But after a while, it's easy to think, ‘OK, look, they almost got away with the map thing, and although they had to unwind the sale, there wasn't too much of a fall-out; if I were they, I'd just lay it all out and shrug when the good-governance types whine.' Maybe that's what they're doing -- you don't want to count on it, but heck, I don't own the stock, so I can let it lie.

Instead, the new revelations suggest there was, and is, a lot more lurking below the surface. There's a single line in last year's proxy that suggests McClendon might be borrowing under the Founder Well Participation Program, saying the program "does not restrict sales, other dispositions or financing transactions" involving his interests in it. What's missing is any indication that he might have more than $1 billion in borrowing backing the program, that his lenders might also do business with Chesapeake (putting him in a potentially awkward situation, to say the least), or that -- as the original Reuters article suggests -- his personal loans might require him to take certain actions that put him in conflict with Chesapeake's shareholders. That's a lot.

Now there's a suggestion, in an article by The Wall Street Journal's excellent Russell Gold, that Chesapeake may not have fully disclosed some $1.4 billion in off-balance-sheet arrangements of its own. That would seriously ratchet up the disclosure failures, in my view.

Go to the Jump for more of Theo Francis and the rest of the Wrap.

On the shale gas patch, the twain decidedly do not meet: Shale gas drillers, on the receiving end of two years of withering attacks by anti-fracking elements, have launched a counter-offensive. A special-purposed group of 11 big industry players including ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and Anadarko issued an eight-page code of conduct for hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania and New York (pictured above, outside the town of Waynesburg, Pa.). I spoke with Anadarko CEO James Hackett, a leader of the group, before the Obama administration's release today of somewhat stiff rules governing fracking on federal land. As I wrote at EnergyWire, Hackett said the group wished to "set a good example" -- a high bar for all operators on the patch in order to reassure public opinion. But Hackett's vituperative description of critics suggests little room for conciliation between the sides. In a nutshell, Hackett sees himself as a patriot, and his critics as anti-science extremists, and worse.

The industry embarked on the standards as part of studies requested by the Department of Energy and a diverse group called the National Petroleum Council. But it was all against the backdrop of hyper-critical media like "Gasland," Josh Fox's much-watched 2010 documentary on fracking. The companies felt that shale gas "can be developed responsibly, but you had a slew of articles coming out from the New York Times. Whether they were fact-based or not didn't seem to matter," Hackett told me. "The Cornell study, the Duke study, the hysteria that people were trying to create around hydraulic fracturing, which was scientifically misplaced."

So there was industry interest in counter-attacking, Hackett said. But once they were into the process, the CEOs started thinking more broadly that they had something to gain by conceding to regulation. Hackett:

There was a feeling that this could be a useful way for us to proceed long term, because the truth is that the technology does keep changing and the practices keep changing. And we have every bit or more a stake of how the regulatory process evolves and society's acceptances of our industry. We have a bigger stake than I'd say than anyone else but the citizenry that we want to make sure is educated about what the benefits of this are so that they don't just say, ‘You lose your license to operate,' without understanding what it means when they say that.

Read on for more of James Hackett, and the rest of the Wrap.

What do you do if you have the natural gas equivalent of 6 billion barrels of oil, and no way to get it to a market? And what if you are uncertain that there will ever be a profitable market for this stranded treasure, at least in the coming couple of decades?

If you are Alaska and the Big Oil companies drilling there, you check the numbers, and check them again, but know that ultimately you will be gambling based on the following calculus: In the glutted U.S., natural gas prices are at their lowest in a decade, under $2 per 1,000 cubic feet; in Asia, the same volume of gas is selling for up to ten times that sum, or $20.

So it is that BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil are contemplating spending $40 billion for a liquefied natural gas system to emancipate their natural gas riches on Alaska's North Slope, and shipping it on to Asia, as I have written at EnergyWire.

If they proceed, which seems likely, they will be locked in battle with far-flung gas sellers -- Qatar, Russia, Australia and Mozambique among them -- who are already piling in to take advantage of Asia's high prices and voracious appetite. In particular, they are piling in to China.

Call China the Hub of Hope, the 800-pound gorilla in the whole of the big energy shakeup we are witnessing around the world. Oil demand is contracting in the U.S. and Europe, but it is soaring in China. Natural gas demand is ticking up gradually in these same developed markets, but China's is going up at double-digit annual rates.  

It is this Chinese demand -- and not just political risk associated with Iran -- that is propping up oil prices at over $100 a barrel, as well as Asian gas prices. As long as these conditions keep oil at approximately such levels, you will continue to see a boom in the production of U.S. oil shale and Canadian oil sands, in addition to the excitement in ultra-deep water around the world. Lower those prices substantially, and at least some of the eagerness will go too.

If the largest consumer of oil on the planet abruptly does two things -- doubles its own liquids production and cuts its imports in half -- one might find a big chain-reaction in both macroeconomics and geopolitics. This is precisely what many of the country's top industry analysts suggest is happening in the United States -- that the country will soon account for almost all its own oil requirements, and be in the position of exporting some of it. Count me as a skeptic, but since so many serious analysts are not, it merits looking under the hood.

Yesterday I raised the potential for a U.S. political shakeout if the oil-abundant theorists are correct: If the U.S. truly does become effectively self-sufficient in oil, political support for clean-energy would be seriously undermined.

Today, the Obama Administration imposed super-strict standards on the emissions from coal-fired power plants, incentivizing the development of carbon-capture technology, as well as the use of natural gas. This demonstrates that aggressive public policy can keep the goals of the clean-tech edifice alive; but it cannot be taken as a template, since policy ebbs and flows, and any future Republican administration, for example, is unlikely to embrace the same philosophy.

What about the economic wrinkles of a shift to oil as a trigger of a new U.S. Industrial Revolution, as forecast by Citibank analyst Ed Morse? Low-price energy provides a big advantage to U.S. makers of chemicals and plastics, since the feedstock -- natural gas -- is so cheap. Yet would this edge flow up the line to high-end technologies, the foundation of the overall U.S. economic advantage?

I exchanged emails with Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College and the author of The Race for What's Left. Klare thinks that oil abundance could have a fundamental impact on the character of the United States. He said:

I see this as making the United States more like a Third World petro-state -- we will see increased economic benefits in some quarters and among certain specialized labor sectors. But we will become more like a basic commodity producer that must lower its environmental standards in order to boost production, and less like a modern high-tech country like Germany and Japan.

The war of tight oil: Are we in an age of oil plenty, or a stubborn era of scarcity? The folks with skin in the game are among those who cannot agree. At Citigroup, Seth Kleinman leads a group of analysts (including the venerable Ed Morse) who issued a note to clients this week declaring "the death of the peak oil hypothesis," a belief that there is a limit to how much oil can be produced. The actor in this murder is shale oil, the sister to shale gas, which is being unleashed from hard underground shale through the application of hydraulic fracturing. "The U.S. appears to be on course, after many weak starts, to achieve energy independence this decade," Kleinman writes. In a shot over the bow of doubters, the Citi team snickers at those who cannot notice the truth before their eyes: "We expect industry expectations to lag behind reality, just as they did with shale gas for many years." They go on to tally up how they see the new oil patch:

U.S. crude and product imports are now about 11 million barrels a day, with about 3 million barrels a day of product exports. This leaves import reliance at 8 million barrels a day. If shale oil grows by 2 million barrels a day, which we think is conservative, and California adds its 1 million barrels a day to the Gulf of Mexico's 2 million barrels a day, we reduce import reliance to 3 million barrels a day. Canadian production is expected to rise by 1.6 million barrels a day by 2020, and much of this will effectively be stranded in North America, and there is the potential to cut demand both through conservation and a shift in transportation demand to natural gas by at least 1 million barrels a day and by some calculations by 2 million barrels a day.

Voila, U.S. energy independence.

Not so fast, say the analysts at Barclays Capital, who issued their own, nearly simultaneous note to clients saying the opposite. The note, by Paul Horsnell and Amrita Sen, suggests that Barclays' clientele guard against "the near-euphoria surrounding the potential of oil shales in the U.S., together with a natural bias in the market to be overly optimistic on oil supplies." The oil market is extremely tight, made the more so by political upheaval, says the Barclays team. They write:

While posing some stirring prospects following almost a decade of dismal performance by non-OPEC supply, oil shales alone are simply not enough to offset the decline in other parts of non-OPEC and meet all the incremental demand growth. The scale of growth in U.S. output really needs to be put into perspective. North Dakota still only produces 0.5 million barrels a day, which in a weak year, incremental Chinese oil demand alone can consume all of and more. Does shale oil help the U.S. reduce its dependence on foreign oil? Yes, it does. But does it remake the U.S. into the next Saudi Arabia? No, at least not yet.

There you have it.

Go to the Jump for more of the Wrap.

Natural gas is roiling global geopolitics, but the latest news -- a bad result in Europe -- is that the tsunami is still very much solely U.S.-based.

The U.S. shale gas boom has shaken up geopolitical presumptions by challenging Russia's gas-led hold on Europe, and threatening to crush far-dirtier rival fuels such as coal around the world. The thinking has been that Europe -- specifically Poland -- might be next in unleashing big, new shale gas supplies, an event that would make life even more difficult for Russia's petro-ruler, Vladimir Putin.

But ExxonMobil yesterday announced that its Polish drilling efforts (pictured above, drilling in the eastern Polish village of Grzebowilk) thus far have failed, reports Bloomberg's Joe Carroll. Exxon, the world's largest publicly owned producer of natural gas, said two exploratory wells in eastern Poland failed to produce sufficient gas to be profitable. This comes on top of a slew of bad signs about Europe's gas prospects: Over the last two years, drilling by three wildcatters -- Lane Energy, 3Legs Resources and BNK Petroleum -- produced only small volumes in northwest Poland, Bernstein Energy said in a note to clients this morning. Last year, Shell announced similar negative results in Sweden, and in 2010 Exxon declared its Hungarian shale-gas efforts a failure. On top of this, France and Bulgaria have banned hydraulic fracturing, the method used to produce shale gas.

In the last episode, we were awash in gas: President Barack Obama is using the language of a shale gas enthusiast, crowing this week that the United States has sufficient reserves of the fuel to last 100 years. For that reason, the U.S. ought to push ahead with natural gas development, as long as safety concerns are kept in mind, said Obama (above, pictured this week on the campaign trail). Almost simultaneously, though, large volumes of that gas have vanished. First, the administration's own energy think tank -- the Energy Information Administration -- sharply lowered its estimate of U.S. shale gas reserves: rather than the 827 trillion cubic feet in unproved technically recoverable reserves announced last year, the EIA estimates that the country has 482 trillion cubic feet, or 41 percent less. The drop is understandable -- it has to do with the addition of completed wells, which provides more data points for the EIA to insert into its reserves model. But some serious analysts think even the lowered numbers are soft; Chris Nelder, for instance, writes that all that can be surmised credibly is an 11-year supply of gas at current consumption rates.

Then there is actual production. Chesapeake and ConocoPhillips have both announced the withdrawal of a substantial volume of gas from the market because of firesale prices that prevail, currently $2.77 per 1,000 cubic feet, compared with $13 in 2008. Chesapeake -- the second-largest U.S. gas producer -- said it will sell 8 percent less gas this year than last; Conoco says it will lower production by 4 percent. It is not that the companies are going broke -- as discussed previously, much of the gas is in the same geological formations as highly lucrative oil, so drillers themselves say they earn excellent profit regardless. Yet, they would like to earn greater profit still by driving gas prices higher through the law of supply and demand -- currently, there is a super-glut of gas; they would like to reduce that to a mere glut. Of course, the drillers in part have themselves to blame for sagging U.S. gas demand: In 2009, the shale gas industry vigorously opposed Obama's push for cap-and-trade legislation, under which electric utilities  would have accelerated their transition from coal- to gas-fired plants. The drillers would be selling much more gas, and prices would thus probably be higher. Alas, those politics were not to be. The Financial Times' Ed Crooks quotes Oppenheimer's Fadel Gheit: "I would expect all large gas producers without exception to scale back production this year."

These developments are important for a single reason: The U.S. is the epicenter of the global shale gas boom. Because of the U.S. bonanza, for example, Russia has been shaken in Europe. China might be next to join the boom. It is importing U.S. technology; if it succeeds in producing substantial shale gas, it could transform its own set of circumstances. But if the numbers are consequentially smaller than supposed, and if the market is slow to absorb the higher volumes, the geopolitical outcomes will be muted.

Go to the Jump for more of the Wrap

Role-playing in the Persian Gulf: Iran continues to insist that it is building an innocent nuclear power industry but, as it discovered again this week, a successful serial assassin does not believe it. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan is the fifth Iranian nuclear scientist to be slain in four years, writes the New York Times' Scott Shane, who reports on a general spate of mayhem rained on Tehran's purported foray into nuclear energy. At New York magazine, Dan Amira regards the predicament of Iranian nuclear scientists as an opportunity for amusement. Certainly there is something darkly satirical about Iran's self-parody. If you really are only developing nuclear power, open the whole thing up like a public swimming pool so any mystery vanishes. If you, conversely, are carrying out as everyone assumes -- that is, developing nuclear arms -- why stir the pot with provocative outbursts all-but certain to lead to attempts to confound your program? Why not wait until your work is complete before throwing sand into others' eyes?

Whatever the case, the U.S., Europe and an important majority of their allies have agreed collectively to stop buying Iran's 2.3 million barrels a day of oil exports. Of Iran's major customers, only China and perhaps Turkey so far refuse to go along. The client for some 540,000 barrels of Iranian crude a day, China will probably continue this trade and store the crude in its strategic petroleum reserve, reports the Financial Times' Javier Blas. As for the rest of Iran's output, those familiar with oil smuggling have assumed that Iran will simply turn to deep discounts in order to unload its crude on the black market, but Blas writes that Tehran may have a difficult time doing so because of a global embrace of the sanctions.

Iran has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, but probably won't do so since it would be one of the primary victims of such a blockade, assert Frank Verrastro, David Pumphrey and Guy Caruso at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Yet one cannot feel entirely certain about that, they add. "Desperate nations driven to the brink sometimes do desperate and unpredictable things, and even if short lived, disruption to shipping in the Gulf would undoubtedly wreak havoc in oil markets," the trio says.

Go to the Jump for more of the Wrap

Iraq -- drilling in a (former) war zone: With the U.S. military role in Iraq officially over, so vanishes the main official outside protection afforded Big Oil, which is working there in droves.  Iraq is the largest potential new oil bonanza on the planet -- it has the second-largest known reserves next to Saudi Arabia. For oilmen, this is a bracing new day: One can hire an army of former commandoes as security -- which the companies do -- but the presence of a friendly Western security force is a qualitatively different and assuring thing. Bombings are a regular occurrence; as the Wall Street Journal's Hassan Hafidh reports, BP temporarily stopped producing oil in part of southern Iraq's Rumaila field after someone bombed pipelines.

Yet business goes on: Big Oil's stomach for badlands rises in proportion with the potential output, and in the case of Iraq's three big southern fields -- West Qurna and Zubair (pictured above), in addition to Rumaila -- the companies have pledged to produce 6.8 million barrels a day. That is a massive goal, considering that the same companies -- BP, Italy's Eni and ExxonMobil -- plan to produce just one-sixth of that daily volume from fields of similar collective size on the Caspian Sea. The Iraqi government has a stake in ensuring the companies' relative safety as its ambitions are even greater -- it hopes to raise the country's production to 12 million barrels a day by 2017. Virtually everyone outside the country regards the higher aim as fantasy. One reason is that, quite apart from the security situation, Iraqi bureaucrats make it hard for the companies to operate, reports Bloomberg. "The red tape companies encounter in Iraq -- when they apply for employee visas, for example, or try to import equipment or seek payment -- seems to reflect attitudes rooted in the past," the agency writes.

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About the impending arrival of U.S. energy independence: We return to the twist in our energy and geopolitical circumstances that we are hearing about -- that, contrary to the drumbeat regarding peak oil to which we have become accustomed, there is no problem on the global energy patch. There is abundant oil, report the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Financial Times; not only that, it is located in the nearby, secure Western Hemisphere (pictured above, happy days in Brazil), and not in the violent-and-volatile Middle East; moreover, the United States may be on the verge of achieving what had seemed to be merely fabled -- "energy independence." We expressed our doubts about these findings when they emerged a few days ago. And though this is not a peak-oil blog, suffice it to say that our brow has not become less furrowed. One reason is the mathematics behind the theoretical revision. Let's start with the suggestion that the gravitational center of oil is shifting from the Middle East to the Western Hemisphere, as we read in the Times, the Post, and last month here at Foreign Policy. In order for that to happen, Western Hemispheric oil production should comfortably surpass the Middle East's 25 million barrels of oil a day. When you add up the numbers, North and South American producers currently pump some 21 million barrels a day. The bright-picture scenario suggests another 7-9 million barrels a day (additional supplies of 3 million barrels a day from Brazil, 1.5-4.5 million barrels a day from Canadian oil sands, and 2.5 million barrels a day from U.S. onshore oil shale). Shaving off a bit for depletion of current fields, and you get roughly the same production for the concentrated Middle East as for the far-flung Western Hemisphere, with no single country bearing the singular heft of a Saudi Arabia. It is a tidy volume, but not quite the forecasted tectonic shakeup.

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