The head of Russia’s oil pipeline monopoly Transneft, which carries over 10 percent of the world’s oil supply to market, takes a charitable view of Russia’s oil output growth. At a time when oil prices are on the slide, and the OPEC group of oil producing nations is cutting production, he thinks energy-rich Russia must keep pumping more to help the world’s less fortunate consuming nations and their economies.

“What about our beloved Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? We can’t do it (let production stagnate). We have to support them,” he joked.

But he added, on a more serious note:

“In the United States they keep reserves for the future and fields which are ready to produce are being mothballed and are awaiting their time. I believe the state of our finances and budget allow us to think about such a rational approach.”

Mikhail Slobodin’s Integrated Energy Systems, Russia’s largest private electricity investor, works in a tough industry: Prices for gas are rising, prices for coal are rising more. Russia’s growing economy needs power, and IES has heavy obligations to build new stations at a time when construction costs are soaring and credit is tight. Government price regulation leaves little room for profit.

 And compared to the power industry with its tight finances, the IES chief executive said, his plant personnel can’t help but find the rich neighbours offer more appealing employment.

“Our stations are in big industrial areas. The metals industry is next door and pays its people a lot more. They have an EBITDA margin of 45-50 percent. Uralkali has an EBITDA margin of 75 percent. They can pay their people more. We are losing our own people. It’s really a problem when people on the other side of the fence get 20, 30, 40 percent more.”

You can listen to Slobodin’s remarks in Russian if you click on the link below.

President Dmitry Medvedev is the former chairman of Russia’s state gas export monopoly Gazprom, and the company is viewed as a powerful instrument of the Kremlin’s foreign and domestic policy, but the company’s deputy chief, executive, Alexander Medvedev, says it is not so. 

Even at the height of Russia’s brief war with Georgia over the breakaway territory of Abkhazia, Gazprom was steadily pumping gas to Georgian consumers, Alexander Medvedev said.

 The two Medvedevs are not related, by the way!

A quarter of the gas that heats European homes and powers European industry is piped in thousands of kilometres from the Russian tundra. By 2015, Russia’s share of European gas supplies will rise to at least one third. That powerful lever of influence over Europe’s economy raises the stakes in its confrontation with Russia over its invasion of Georgia.

But Alexander Medvedev, deputy chief executive of Russia’s state gas export monopoly Gazprom, opened the Reuters Russia Investment Summit on Monday with a reminder that even the mighty Gazprom is not invulnerable to Europe and the West, relying as it does on foreign revenue and capital.

If your father heads up the Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries, you might feel entitled to some favours
when you fill up your tank.

But the daughter of OPEC Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri
finds herself having to pay record high fuel prices along with
everyone else.

“My daughter calls me from Canada,” he told the Reuters
Global Energy Summit — and he tells her not to blame him.

“How much is the cost of the oil and how much are the
taxes?” he asked.

Regardless of gasoline, he said the price of unrefined
crude, which hit nearly $140 a barrel last week on international
markets, was unbearably high.

His dream was for a price that would deliver sufficient
returns for oil producers without sending the industrialised
world into turmoil.

“Oil and gas has been the backbone of all this industrial
civilisation. We don’t want to disturb that pattern. We would
like to see a reasonable price where the world will be sailing
through without any disruption,” he said.

The OPEC chief accepted the world would eventually find a
way of weaning itself off its addiction to fossil fuel.

But, hinting at the controversial biofuels that have
devoured water and land, he did not expect in his life-time to
see an alternative that did not create as many problems as it
tried to solve.

“One day there will be an end to oil, but it will take maybe
another 100 years before a renewable energy will come into the
picture that will not affect the life of a human being.”

    By Jeff Jones

    Canada’s energy industry has reached out to both the U.S. Democratic and Republican parties to press its importance as a secure oil and gas supplier as candidates hone their energy policies heading into the November presidential election.
    Canada and the oil-producing province of Alberta have grabbed the attention of many U.S. voters as the oil sands have gained notoriety as a key source of crude imports and as environmentalists warn of the ecological costs.
    “We’ve had conversations with both parties in terms of where energy policy is going to go,” Pierre Alvarez, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, told the Reuters Global Energy Summit.
    “In addition, you’ve started to see that a number of U.S. refiners, the labor unions and others, who are starting to see large investments proceeding in the U.S. to take Canadian crude, are part of that conversation as well,” Alvarez said on the day Barack Obama became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee.
    With oil prices surging above $120 a barrel and Americans paying unprecedented pump prices, encouraging imports from a friendly neighbor with massive reserves seems obvious.
    But Canadian energy executives and politicians were thrown for a loop last year when U.S. lawmakers passed legislation banning the federal government from using fuel sources with higher carbon content than traditional supply, putting oil sands use by big buyers like the military in question.
    Alvarez said that legislation was misunderstood by many, and he has been assured it is not intended to limit oil sands imports.
    “I think U.S. legislators are increasingly aware of the shortages of new supply opportunities, and the oil sands are part of it,” he said.
    “At this point there has been no action in the U.S. that would curtail exports to that market.”
    Environmental groups have intensified efforts to put the spotlight on the impact of frenzied oil sands development on land, air, water and wildlife in northern Alberta. The recent deaths of 500 ducks on a Syncrude Canada tailings pond grabbed headlines around the United States.
    So far, Obama and Republican rival John McCain have said little about Canada’s role in the U.S. energy mix.
    “Once the dust settles we get through the election period, my expectation is we will get a more policy-focused debate as opposed to a politically focused debate,” Alvarez said.

       Politicians clamouring for action to bring down high
commodity prices should be careful what they wish for.

    “The running gag is the price of bread in Moscow,” said
Hans-Bernd Menzel, chief executive of German power exchange EEX,
referring to state price controls.

    “The price of bread was very low, but there was no bread in
Moscow.”

    Now Russia has a more market-oriented regime every commodity
is available at the going rate.

    “I don’t know of one single case where political influence
on prices has improved the situation of the people,” Menzel
said.

Running an energy exchange does not necessarily make it easy
to run an energy efficient household.

The chief executive of Germany’s EEX has just bought a new
flat and, as a carbon-conscious citizen, he was eager to install
an energy efficient kitchen, with an energy efficient fridge.

He succeeded — eventually, but buying it was easier said
than done as salesman after salesman proved unable to give
the right advice.

“I was shocked by the levels of incompetence on that
question,” Hans-Bernd Menzel told the Reuters Global Energy
Summit.

He was particularly unimpressed because for many years it
has been more cost-effective over the longer term to invest in an expensive, but
efficient fridge, rather than to buy a cheap wasteful one.

“Around 15 years ago, I had the same question … The
question of power consumption was already an issue.”

In other areas, there has been progress.

When he first asked his bank if it could buy him carbon
certificates, “it was completely frustrated,” Menzel said.

Now any German citizen wanting to invest in the certificates
used for offsetting carbon emissions only has to ask.

The nation’s second-largest coal producer says “demand is outstripping our ability to supply” and expects “2009 and 2010 continuing to be strong years.”

Fred Katayama reports from Houston.

The massive earthquake in China last month - its worst in three decades - hit global supply chains as well as changed the picture for energy demand for the world’s most populous country.
    
“Everybody knows the human tragedy over there, but there’s been very little discussion around what does this mean on the industrial front,” said John Krenicki President and CEO of GE Energy.

“I think it’s going to be a big story, just like what were the after-effects of Katrina,” he said.    Listen to Krenicki’s comments here.
    
Guy Caruso, head of the Energy Information Administration, talked about how  quake damage to some coal-fired power plants, as well as the Olympics, could boost oil demand in China, at least temporarily.  Listen to Caruso’s comments here.