BP and the Russian squeeze: BP may be moving toward yet another comeuppance in Russia. This chapter in the company's nine long years of Russian misery goes back to January 2011, when it announced a coup -- it was bouncing back from the devastating 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and forming a turbo-partnership with the Russian state oil company Rosneft to drill for oil and gas super-giants in the Arctic Circle. But then things went horribly wrong: BP's regular Russian oligarch partners accused the Britons of violating their rights of first-refusal for any BP deal in Russia. The oligarchs, collectively known as AAR, sued and scuttled the BP-Rosneft deal, and sought billions of dollars in alleged damages. Early this month, BP finally threw in the towel, and said it is assessing offers to buy its half of TNK-BP. Here is where the fresh trouble starts. BP has suggested that there are at least two bidders -- AAR and an unidentified state-run Russian company. Among stock analysts, the general thinking is that, whoever buys the 50 percent, BP could walk away with some $25 billion. But now it appears that that sort of payday will arrive only if AAR fails to have its way. Sadly for BP, the record supports the opposite outcome. In a note to clients on Wednesday, Citigroup's Alastair Syme said that, given the oligarchs' aggressively pursued, $13 billion lawsuit against BP, the Britons are unlikely to achieve the $25 billion figure. How much are they likely to receive? AAR (which believes that BP is bluffing about there being another suitor) is thinking more like $7 billion, right around the figure that BP paid for its share of TNK-BP in 2003 (the Financial Times' Guy Chazan first reported the $7 billion figure, which we have confirmed). In the Russians' apparent view, that would allow BP to save face by leaving with all the money it originally gambled on TNK-BP.

But that may not be the end of BP's latest shellacking. The company is thought to be seeking to leverage its exit from TNK-BP into a position on the resource-rich Arctic, similar to deals struck by ExxonMobil, Italy's ENI and Norway's Statoil, as I write at EnergyWire. But it should not expect kid-gloves treatment by the Russian government. The reason is that President Vladimir Putin and his oil lieutenant, Igor Sechin (pictured above, right and left, respectively), will have closely monitored the latest TNK-BP deal. They will see that BP can be shellacked with impunity. If indeed BP proceeds with the sale of its TNK-BP share, expect this sequence of events: BP sells out for a firesale price to AAR; AAR resells that share or more to a state-run company such as Rosneft at a markup, but less than the $25 billion market price; and BP gets a place on the Arctic, but on far more advantageous terms for the Russian side than achieved with the other western companies.

Go to the Jump for the rest of the Wrap.

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Let's say that the new conventional wisdom is correct -- that we ought to dispense of worries of resource scarcity, and embrace a dawning age of U.S. oil abundance and self-sufficiency. If we ask ourselves what that means, one conclusion is the apparent elimination of a central rationale for the development of clean energy technologies -- that the U.S. needs them to shed its reliance on unreliable oil imports from nefarious Middle East nations.

Clean-tech must be scrutinized through a political lens, because by and large, none of the technologies stands on its own feet as yet in the marketplace. They require political support to survive. Let's take a look at the calculus for clean-tech.

Industry analysts and journalists assert almost weekly (like Citigroup's Ed Morse and reporters at the New York Times) that U.S. shale oil and deepwater reservoirs, plus Canadian oil sands, are making the U.S. virtually self-sufficient in oil. (I myself have urged caution in this exuberance.)

In response, President Barack Obama said last week that oil drilling is not the "be-all, end-all strategy" of being energy self-sufficient, but rather that the U.S. requires "all of the above," meaning solar, wind and biofuels, too. He said this because he wants to retain federal support for cleantech companies and research, but is being pummeled by opponents who call such assistance a boondoggle, and accuse him of hostility to oil. The other reason he said this is that gasoline prices in much of the country are well over $4 a gallon.

Already, politics have knocked out another pillar of the clean-energy foundation -- the push to hold down CO2 emissions. Since there is no longer apparent majority U.S. political will to stave off global warming, clean-tech has seemed to lose that logic for public support.

Now goes the argument of energy security: If the forecasts of a U.S. bonanza are accurate, biofuels, advanced batteries and other technologies will be unneeded for the purpose of energy freedom from the Middle East.

With planetary collapse and energy security eliminated from the calculus, clean-tech would be back to basics -- its sole apparent remaining case for public policy support, at least in the U.S., would be the popularity of things clean. Promoters of these technologies would either have to make that case, or become cost-competitive and survive in the marketplace.

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Starbucks is worried about its coffee-making future, leading to its potential expansion into the juice bar business. Experts warn chocolate lovers that cocoa is endangered. To top it off, competitive balance in both the World Cup and international basketball may be turned on its head, suggests a report that says people are shrinking.

In recent days, we have been subject to lifestyle forecasts that for some people will be the most worrisome yet regarding the impact of climate change. Yet we also are getting the usual diet of more standard reflection, including a report from the New York Times' Elizabeth Rosenthal on global warming's swift transformation in the United States from a Nobel Prize-winning avocation to "a four-letter word."

The rise of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere from the burning of CO2 is a definitive geopolitical issue, as it will eventually make some nations richer and some poorer, some stronger and some weaker. U.S. military leaders have issued repeated reports -- here and here for instance -- that climate change poses a national security threat.

China -- which a few years ago was the most important outlier in the climate-change debate -- now takes the issue seriously, though its economic expansion may eclipse its efforts to reduce emissions, writes Reuters. Around the world, industrial nations are moving to reduce CO2 emissions. But Rosenthal writes that American politics have whipsawed, and complicated, the reduction of emissions.

U.S. ambivalence on the issue is not new -- in the 1990s, then-President Bill Clinton knew he would not get the Kyoto Accords through Senate ratification, so he never submitted the agreement to the process. Yet one wonders whether, if the prospect of rising seas and the loss of national wealth and geopolitical power did not grab attention, the specter of losing a world sports title will.

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TNK-BP: Clutch play by Dudley puts momentum back with BP? Counter-intuitively, the momentum may have shifted back to BP in its latest high-wire negotiations in Russia. BP's Bob Dudley (pictured above), attempting to turn around the company's fortunes after the costly Gulf of Mexico oil spill a year ago, in January dived into a highly tenuous tie-up with Russia's state-owned Rosneft, with whom it hoped to explore the oil-rich Arctic Sea. The tenuous part came because BP's long-time Russian partners, the grouping of four oligarchs known as AAR, blocked the partnership through tribunal rulings in Europe. As late as yesterday, BP and Dudley seemed to be in deep trouble -- BP had offered to buy out AAR's 50 percent of their Russia-based partnership for $27 billion; AAR apparently counter-offered with an ask of $35 billion, part of which would be paid through 10 percent share holdings of both BP and Rosneft. Dudley balked at the shareholding part, and possibly the money too. But just when hope seemed lost, Dudley got Rosneft to extend what had been a drop-dead deadline yesterday for completing their tie-up. Now BP has until this time next month.

Now a curious thing has happened. In a statement issued today, AAR CEO Stan Polovets advises BP to find a way to honor their partnership agreement faithfully. "We trust that BP will use the extension it has got from Rosneft to ensure that both the Arctic opportunity and the share swap are pursued through a structure consistent with BP's obligations under the TNK-BP shareholder agreement," he said. It's curious because Polovets said almost the identical thing yesterday.

If one is in the catbird seat, one generally  remains sphinx-like. Hence, the signal that AAR is a bit uncertain. BP now has time to turn the tables. Chris Weafer, an analyst at UralSib, thinks that the long time extension suggests that the Kremlin intervened at the last minute to keep the deal alive.

Even if he was miserly with the cash -- $35 billion does not seem like too much money for the unlisted company -- Dudley was right to refuse AAR's share demands. He would be a fool to hand over 10 percent of BP -- and hence a board seat -- to the litigious and shark-like AAR, who have shown over the last 15 years a zest for a bloody brawl. Nothing personal, of course.

Should the shale gas tent be folded up? If Cornell Professor Robert Howarth and a couple of his colleagues are correct, there is precious little hope -- very close to none -- of getting greenhouse gas emissions under control and preventing some of the less-pleasant repercussions of  climate change. This week, the Howarth team published a paper disputing one of the main assumptions accompanying the U.S. boom in shale gas drilling -- that it is a positive development because natural gas emits half the greenhouse gases of coal, and a third less than oil. Gas, it has been said here and elsewhere, is a "bridge fuel" until an as-yet undetermined non-fossil fuel technology is scaled up to propel the global economy along with the world's private vehicles. But Howarth says that, when one takes into account the methane released during shale gas production, coal in fact comes out cleaner. Given the hoopla surrounding shale gas, Howarth's paper has attracted much attention, including prominent display in the New York Times. But is he right?

Over at the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Levi isn't so sure. There is no dispute regarding the hazards of methane -- this gas is pernicious. But Levi takes Howarth to task for relying on "isolated cases reported in industry magazines" along with the performance of notoriously bad Russian pipelines for his conclusions regarding how much methane escapes into the atmosphere during hydraulic fracturing, the method by which shale gas is extracted. Levi is at his most brutal in an apparent scientific gaffe -- Howarth used comparative gigajoules in order to measure the methane emissions of shale gas against those of coal. The problem is that gas produces a lot more electricity than coal gigajoule-by-gigajoule, something that Howarth doesn't take account of. For that reason, Levi favors kilowatt-hours for comparison purposes, and regards Howarth's failure to do so as "an unforgivable methodological flaw; correcting for it strongly tilts Howarth's calculations back toward gas, even if you accept everything else he says." Ouch.

Howarth explicitly states his data are thin and that more research is necessary -- methane is under-examined.  Levi agrees with him there.

Here is where we return to one of the industry's own big failures to get out in front, figure out its weak points before critics do, and fix them. We have previously suggested that the error-prone shale gas industry ought to police itself, put peer pressure on its own bad actors to straighten up, and openly disclose the content of its fracking fluid. Now a new front has opened up. It could be too late to recover entirely -- the industry is headed for serious federal regulation, the very thing it has sought to avert.

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