Very smart article by Niall Ferguson on the lessons to be drawn from the financial crisis. As one would expect, many of the wrong lessons have been learned by policymakers. As he says, the 1970s was a period of relatively heavy financial regulation and state controls over part of the banking system, and yet it was a grim period economically (unless you happened to be an OPEC oil producer). He also...

Economy Committee Calls For Lessons To Be Learned From Failed Energy Technologies Institute BidFindings from a parliamentary inquiry published today have called for the Scottish Government to learn lessons from the failed bid to bring the headquarters of a new £1 billion energy technologies institute to Scotland. The investigation by the Scottish Parliament’s Economy, Energy and T...

Reuters:Iraq has approved six more energy companies to participate in its 4th energy auction, raising the number of pre-qualified bidders to 46, a senior oil ministry official said on Wednesday.The auction for 12 new exploration blocs, scheduled for late January, is expected to add 29 trillion cubic feet of gas and 10 billion barrels of oil to Iraqi reserves."We have six companies that were not

Gordon Brown has outlined his vision for an international energy system at a major conference of oil producers and consumers in London today.

Asked about the Global Energy Conference, the PMS said that the purpose of the meeting was to follow up on the very constructive meeting that took place in Jeddah in June, which had been the first time in memory that oil producers and oil consumers had got round the same table at such a high level. The purpose of the meeting on Friday would be to discuss how the oil producers and oil consumers cou...

Of course the BP oil spill is not merely metaphorical, but it does capture something about the un-governability of modern America.

Iraq's Oil Ministry has excluded U.S oil firm Hess Corp from competing in its 4th energy auction because the company signed deals with Iraq's northern Kurdish region, a senior Iraqi oil official said on Monday....A laughable attempt to fool the system and avoid blacklisting. You'd expect a company of this size to know better!

Asked how disappointed the Prime Minister was about the suggestion from OPEC that they would not attend the oil summit in London in December, the PMS repeated what we had said at the end of last week; the meeting following the Jeddah format in December was suggested before the current period of instability across the global economic system. There would now be a meeting of Heads of Government from ...

It seems that Abu Dhabi is going to make an effort on the renewable energy front. Despite being a state that has a lot of oil, it is trying to think ahead and think of alternative ways of generating energy. Sounds like a good idea - their government is perhaps being very forward-thinking.

After addressing the leaders of the oil industry near Aberdeen yesterday, The sub-Prime Minister said Britain needed to do more to diversify our supply of energy."We will be more ambitious for our plans for nuclear energy in the future" he said.Of course all this has nothing to do with the oil crisis, but it has everything to do with lack of investment into the power industry over the past 11 year...