Custom Search
Feb 2, 2011
petroleum
BP faces US investigation into gas market manipulation
BP, the oil company struggling to restore its image in the United States following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, may face charges relating to manipulation of the US gas market.
"The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are currently investigating several BP entities regarding trading in the next-day natural gas market at Houston Ship Channel during October and November 2008," BP said on Wednesday.
The FERC's enforcing body is now considering whether to pursue charges against BP.
In 2006, the company was prosecuted on propane market manipulation charges in the country. BP paid around $300m to settle those charges.
“BP conducts its trading and transportation activities in compliance with the law and regulations,” Scott Dean, a company spokesman, said.
The company said it had fully cooperated with the FERC and the CFTC investigations and provided “a detailed response that it did not engage in any inappropriate or unlawful activity”.
BP also faced a call from Mississippi for the US courts must compel the administrator of BP's $20bn oil spill fund to meet his legal obligations and stop short-changing victims of the Gulf of Mexico disaster.
Until now, "sweeping deficiencies and violations of law" characterize the Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF) fund run by independent administrator Kenneth Feinberg, state Attorney General Jim Hood said in a memorandum to a federal court in Louisiana on Tuesday, Reuters reports.
"Court intervention and action is needed to compel BP to cure its failure to provide a claims process that fulfills the requirements of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, state law and prior public commitments of BP," the memorandum said.
This news cames as the row between BP and it Russian partners in it joint venture TNK-BP escalated.
BP admitted it may be forced to pay compensation to its Russian oligarch partners, as the two sides agreed to let an UN arbitration court settle their latest bitter row.
The oligarchs, who co-own BP's Russian oil fields, are unhappy about their British partner's plans to swap £5bn of shares with Rosneft – a Kremlin-backed rival. On Tuesday they were granted an injunction to halt the £10bn Rosneft deal temporarily.
The furore overshadowed BP's full-year results and the first quarterly dividend payment since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The dividend, seven cents per share, is half its previous level. BP also swung to a full-year loss of $4.9bn (£3.1bn), posted lower-than-expected profits for the fourth quarter of $4.4bn and put its troubled Texas City refinery up for sale.
Oligarchs 'very friendly'
At a results presentation, Bob Dudley, the chief executive, insisted that relations were still "very friendly" with the oligarchs behind TNK-BP, the Russian joint venture that produces a third of BP's oil output. Asked about the dispute, he said: "I'm sure we will reach a good business resolution. It may be a financial or strategic direction. I think it will resolve itself."
But just an hour later, lawyers for the two sides were fighting it out at London's High Court, where a judge granted a temporary order preventing all further talks between BP and Rosneft. It will apply until the dispute is heard at a United Nations arbitration court in Sweden and may be extended.
The billionaires known as Alfa Access Renova (AAR) – Mikhail Fridman, Len Blatvatnik, German Kahn and Viktor Vekselberg – claim the Rosneft deal violates their previous agreement with BP.
They claim that all deals in Russia should be conducted through TNK-BP and that it should have been included in talks. BP insisted that an injunction will not derail the deal, only cause a "time-out",adding that the oligarchs' threat to withhold a $1.8bn dividend was not material.
Wikileaks revelations
The row is a reignition of tensions between BP and the oligarchs from 2008, when Mr Dudley was forced to flee Russia alleging he had been harrassed.
US diplomatic cables revealed by Wikileaks claim Mr Dudley did not trust Rosneft and likened Russia's attitude towards the oil industry to Venezuela - where private assets were routinely seized.
Mr Dudley dismissed the cables as "more fairytale than fact". Asked what reasons he had for trusting the Kremlin and whether investors could be sure BP's Russian assets would not be seized, he said: "All I can promise is my belief that [seizure] won't happen."
Unveiling the company's strategic review, Mr Dudley said the Rosneft deal was a "good example" of potential future partnerships with state oil companies. He said a smaller BP would now focus on "value, not volume; and quality, not quantity".
Half of BP's US refining business will be spun off and the company will continue to sell peripheral assets to help fund the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. BP warned that oil production will be lower while it "consolidates". Output will also be hit by continuing disruption to activities in the Gulf of Mexico, where deepwater drilling has still not fully recovered.
BP also added an extra $1bn to its earlier $40bn estimate of the cost of the oil spill, at a time when analysts have been starting to cut their estimates for the bill.
Case stays secret
Shareholders may never know how deeply the dispute runs between BP and the oligarchs, because a judge ruled the Russians’ application for an injunction should be heard in private.
David Price, solicitor advocate for The Telegraph, challenged the ruling, arguing that information revealed in an earlier session attended by journalists should be reported in the public interest. However,
Mr Justice Burton decided the hearing should remain behind closed doors. This means the press cannot report which side wanted the hearing to be in secret and what their reasons are for asking for information to be kept out of the public domain.
More than 30 journalists were at the High Court expecting to hear details of the dispute between Alfa Petroleum Holdings, the vehicle of one oligarch, and BP.
After Mr Justic Burton granted the order, the two sides agreed to enter arbitration proceedings in Sweden, which will remain in private.
oil
Watch out: oil still has the power to shock
Oil, it seems, still has the power to shock. It's impossible to know where the political turmoil in Egypt and the rest of the region might end, but one thing it has already done is further drive up the oil price, threatening to wreak havoc with the still fragile recovery in many advanced economies.
The oil price is high while the advanced economies are weak, the reverse of what's happened in the past. The West is seriously out of sync with the oil price Photo: AP
How serious a problem is this, and how should policy makers react? The first thing to note is that high oil prices nearly always play some sort of role in recessions. In the US, all post-war recessions have been preceded by an oil price spike. The last all-consuming one is widely attributed to the fallout from Lehman Brothers' collapse, but in fact record prices at the pumps had put consumer confidence and spending into a tailspin several months before. Lehman was only the icing on the cake – more of a symptom than a cause. Americans took one look at the price of filling up, and decided to stop spending.
The second point to note is that price shocks of this sort have always been a policy nightmare for central banks. A rising oil price is both inflationary, in that it adds to the cost of living, and deflationary, in that it also acts like a tax by taking money out of people's pockets. The cost to the US economy of last year's rise in the oil price was approximately $120bn (£74bn), or nearly 1pc of GDP. That's a big hit.
Should policy makers therefore react by tightening monetary conditions to choke off any inflationary consequences, or by easing them to counteract the negative consequences for demand?
Both these responses have been tried in the past, with disastrous consequences on each occasion. In the 1970s, the oil price shocks were met by a loosening of policy in the US and Europe, but this only succeeded in further embedding the inflationary problem. Mindful of this, the European Central Bank raised rates in July of 2008 to deal with sky-high oil prices, only to run headlong into the most serious recession since the 1930s.
The ECB Governing Council meets on Thursday to decide on what to do this time. We can but hope that it has learned from past mistakes. Does policy remain in the sway of the Germans, with their strongly growing economy, or will the needs of the deflating periphery continue to dominate?
oil
Oil hovers below $91 as US crude supplies jump
Oil prices hovered below $91 a barrel Wednesday as markets kept an eye on developments in Egypt and a report showed U.S. gasoline and crude supplies rose more than expected last week, suggesting the recovery in demand remains uneven.
By early afternoon in Europe, benchmark crude for March delivery was down 19 cents at $90.58 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $1.42 to settle at $90.77 a barrel on Tuesday.
In London, Brent crude was unchanged at $101.65 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange. It rose as high as $102.04 earlier in the session.
The large difference between the Nymex and Brent contracts "is attributable mainly to declining European inventory levels ... as well as reports of sporadic field outages and trader accumulation of some North Sea cargoes that took place in late January," said Edward Meir, senior commodity analyst at MF Global in New York.
The American Petroleum Institute said late Tuesday that gasoline inventories rose 3.9 million barrels last week while analysts surveyed by Platts, the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill Cos., had forecast an increase of 2.0 million barrels. Inventories of crude rose 3.8 barrels and distillates fell 1.1 million barrels, the API said.
The Energy Department's Energy Information Administration reports its weekly supply data — the market bechmark — later Wednesday.
Oil has come off two-year highs above $92 earlier this week as investor fears eased that chaos in Egypt could disrupt the two million barrels of crude per day that pass through the Suez Canal and an adjacent pipeline.
There's "mounting evidence that crude supplies through either the Suez Canal or SUMED pipeline are unlikely to be disrupted as a result of continued Egyptian street uprisings," Ritterbusch and Associates said in a report.
The influence of the situation in Egypt, however, was expected to continue supporting prices.
"The problem is not ... Egypt as an oil producer, it's Egypt as a stabilizer of this region, or as a destabilizer of this region," Jean-Louis Schilansky, head of the French Oil Industry Union told AP Television News. "It's the fear of what can happen by contagion in other countries of this region that provokes this tension."
In other Nymex trading in March contracts, heating oil was down 0.14 cent at $2.7556 a gallon and gasoline fell 0.88 cent to $2.5106 a gallon. Natural gas futures for March delivery were up 1.8 cents at $4.365 per 1,000 cubic feet.
___
Alex Kennedy in Singapore contributed to this report.
hosting
How to Use Google Analytics for Tracking Your Website Users
Knowing the trend of visitors to your website is a major key to the success of any web-based project, whether it is e-commerce, entertainment, content or pure corporate presence on the Internet. Knowing the profile and preference of your users helps you design your website and offerings to match their preference and increase your chances of success for whatever activity you seek to achieve through the website.
Among the most standard and popular tools used for website analytics and research is Google Analytics. This tool is widely used since it provides a host of basic as well as advanced analytical reports for your website. Few of the areas for which Google Analytics provides reports are:
- About visitors – Geographic location, repeat visits, loyalty, time spent etc
- Traffic sources – Trends of traffic coming directly, through referring websites, search engines and online advertising campaigns
- Content – Popular web pages on your website
Google analytics provides these details and more, and that too free of cost!
Installing Google Analytics is a simple process. Here are the steps on how you can enable it for your own website.
Step 1: Generate the tracking code
- Open the Google Analytics website.
- If you have a Gmail or Google account, on the Google Analytics website click Access Analytics. Otherwise, click the Sign Up Now link to create a new account.
- On the Getting Started page, click the Sign Up button.
The Analytics: New Account Signup wizard will start.
- In this wizard, fill in the details about your website.
- At the end of the wizard, you will be provided with a tracking code for your website. Copy this code and save it in a text file on your computer.
Step 2: Add the code to your website
To track traffic and users on your website, the code that you just copied will need to open the HTML code of each and every web page on your website.
So, you must next paste this code within the <body> section of the web page code. You must paste this text either at the beginning or at the end of the <body> section.
Your job becomes easier if your website is based on a template. It this case, you may include the code in footer or header of the website template, to ensure that it appears on every page of your website.
Step 3: View the analysis data
When you sign in once again into your Google Analytics account after few hours, you will see your website enlisted. When you click on it, you will get access to a variety of reports provided by Google Analytics.
These reports provided by Google Analytics will help you make decisions pertaining to content and overall design of your website.
Free Google Web Hosting
Free Google Web Hosting
Does Google offer web hosting?
Well, not really. But in a way, they actually do, and it’s free to use. Simply visit http://sites.google.com and signup for an account.
We actually created one just to test it out using their “Project Wiki” pre-made theme:
It took all of about 5 seconds to pick the website and theme we wanted. We could even map a domain to it in order to use our own domain name if we wanted. The best part is, it’s probably hosted on a pretty robust server given Google’s reputation for uptime.
This service is perfect to use if you know nothing about web design, and you want to create a simple website for your club, small business, or organization. It’s easy to edit the pages and “widgets” you can add into the site, some of which have some pretty neat functionality.
Based on our experience with Google, it probably integrates well into their other products like analytics and adsense as well.
What are the drawbacks though?
- No control over server software or settings like you would have with a dedicated server. So forget this if you want to install a script or run something database driven.
- Space limitations: 100 mb per site (as of time this was posted)
- Max attachment size: 20 mb
- A long list of unsupported file types
- Strict code limitations: JavaScript, iframes, style tags and other custom code are removed to prevent their use by potential Web intruders. This type of code will be stripped from your page if added.
What are some paid alternatives to Google Web Hosting?
- Hostgator.com
My experience with Hostgator has been exceptional. They have far exceeded my expectations so far. In a desperate attempt to get some of our websites off of Mediatemple’s terrible Grid service, I signed up for an unlimited shared hosting account at Hostgator, for around $15 / month, and started monitoring the service’s uptime using Pingdom. For a couples of months now those sites have been running problem free with no downtime. Hostgator’s support has also been exceptional the few times we needed to call, by answering the phone quickly and having a knowledgeable tech on the line. - Liquidweb’s Shared or VPS Accounts
Liquidweb has long been our favorite web host, and their support has been consistently excellent since we signed up with them for our dedicated server years ago. They offer shared hosting that is competitive in price to Mediatemple’s, and if you can afford to move up to VPS, be sure to sign up using our coupon to save $30 / month forever on their VPS accounts.
What about FREE alternatives to Google Web Hosting?
I don’t have any experience in dealing with the following free hosts, but here’s a list to start with. It would be prudent to Google some reviews on them and see what kind of limitations they have. Most often in the past, free web hosts like Geocities would pay for their service by framing your site with an ad banner that they got the revenue from.
Top Web Hosts Worldwide
Top Web Hosts Worldwide
Rank  | Hosting Company | Country | Market Share | Total Domains |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | WILDWESTDOMAINS.COM |  | 23.7415 % | 28,677,271 |
| 2 | ENOM.COM | | 2.7292 % | 3,296,640 |
| 3 | NETWORKSOLUTIONS.COM | | 2.4424 % | 2,950,132 |
| 4 | ONEANDONE.COM | | 2.228 % | 2,691,151 |
| 5 | DSREDIRECTION.COM | | 1.7327 % | 2,092,880 |
| 6 | XINNET.COM |  | 1.7289 % | 2,088,317 |
| 7 | YAHOO.COM | | 1.6215 % | 1,958,598 |
| 8 | SEDOPARKING.COM |  | 1.6082 % | 1,942,550 |
| 9 | BUYDOMAINS.COM | | 1.509 % | 1,822,774 |
| 10 | HOSTGATOR.COM | | 1.1872 % | 1,434,071 |
| 11 | REGISTER.COM | | 1.1684 % | 1,411,275 |
| 12 | BLUEHOST.COM | | 1.033 % | 1,247,710 |
| 13 | DREAMHOST.COM | | 0.9055 % | 1,093,790 |
| 14 | CASHPARKING.COM | | 0.8993 % | 1,086,216 |
| 15 | HICHINA.COM | | 0.8368 % | 1,010,797 |
Top Web Hosting Companies
Top Web Hosting Companies
:: Egypt ::
| Rank | Hosting Company | Domains |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2MSRV2.COM | 4,622 |
| 2 | LINK.NET | 4,172 |
| 3 | TEDATA.NET | 2,284 |
| 4 | MHGOZ.COM | 1,415 |
| 5 | BYWW.COM | 1,203 |
| 6 | SOTMASR.COM | 1,079 |
| 7 | 2MSRV23.COM | 811 |
| 8 | DNSEGYPT.COM | 719 |
| 9 | HOST-WARE.COM | 483 |
| 10 | NILEWEB.COM | 457 |
| 11 | SERVGROUPS.COM | 430 |
| 12 | NILE-ONLINE.NET | 408 |
| 13 | DNSEGYPT.NET | 336 |
| 14 | ROCK2HOST.COM | 330 |
| 15 | ILD-ONLINE.COM | 300 |
gold news
 | P.M. Kitco Metals Roundup: Comex Gold Ends Lower on Firmer U.S. Dollar Index, Weak Near-Term Technical Posture 02 February 2010, 01:59 p.m. By Jim Wyckoff Of Kitco News http://www.kitco.com/ |
(Kitco News) - Comex gold futures prices closed moderately lower Wednesday, amid a firmer U.S. dollar index and on the bearish near-term technical tilt of the market. Comex April gold last traded down $8.60 at $1,331.70 an ounce. Spot gold last traded down $10.80 at $1,331.50.
The U.S. dollar index rose modestly Wednesday on some short covering, which was a slightly bearish factor for the precious metals. However, the dollar index bears still have overall near-term technical advantage and did hit a fresh three-month low overnight. Gold bulls have been disappointed recently that gold prices have not seen more upside support from the weaker dollar index.
Egypt's continuing civil unrest and the uncertainty regarding the situation will keep the sellers in gold at least somewhat restrained for the near term. There were clashes between protesters on the streets in Cairo Wednesday. In fluid situations like the one in Egypt at present, no one can predict if the worst is over, or is yet to come, regarding demonstrations and violence. Precious metals traders are still keeping a close eye on the situation in Egypt.
Crude oil prices have backed down from it's recent highs and were trading near steady levels Wednesday. The crude market had reached strong overhead resistance at the January high of $93.46, basis the March Nymex futures contract. If crude oil prices do back off further, that would be a bearish underlying factor for the gold market.
Traders are awaiting Friday's key U.S. jobs report. That report is expected to show non-farm payrolls grew by around 135,000 in January. Stronger U.S. jobs growth in Friday's report would likely support the U.S. dollar index and be a negative for the precious metals markets.
The London P.M. gold fix was $1,337.00 versus the previous P.M. fixing of $1,331.50.
Technically, April Comex gold futures prices closed nearer the session low Wednesday. Gold prices are still in a four-week-old downtrend on the daily bar chart, but trading action has become choppy just recently. Bulls' next near-term upside technical objective is to produce a close above solid technical resistance at last week's high of $1,354.00. Bears' next near-term downside price objective is closing prices below solid technical support at last week's low of $1,309.10. First resistance is seen at $1,340.00 and then at today's high of $1,345.60. Support is seen at today's low of $1,327.30 and then at this week's low of $1,323.60. Wyckoff's Market Rating: 5.0.
March silver futures closed down 24.9 cents at $28.265 an ounce Wednesday. Prices closed nearer the session low after hitting a fresh two-week high early on. A firmer U.S. dollar index and weaker crude oil prices did help to pressure silver Wednesday. The silver bulls still have the overall near-term technical advantage. The next downside price objective for the bears is closing prices below solid technical support at last week's low of $26.30. Bulls' next upside price objective is producing a close above solid technical resistance at $29.49 an ounce. First resistance is seen at Wednesday's high of $28.72 and then at $29.00. Next support is seen at $28.00 and then at this week's low of $27.52. Wyckoff's Market Rating: 6.0.
March N.Y. copper closed up 15 points at 454.85 cents Wednesday. Prices closed nearer the session high and poked to another fresh contract and all-time record high. The bulls have the solid near-term technical advantage. Bulls' next upside objective is pushing and closing prices above solid technical resistance at 475.00 cents. The next downside price objective for the bears is closing prices below solid technical support at 440.00 cents. First resistance is seen at Wednesday's record high of 456.20 cents and then at 458.00 cents. First support is seen at Wednesday's low of 451.60 cents and then at 450.00 cents. Wyckoff's Market Rating: 9.0.
By Jim Wyckoff of Kitco News; jwyckoff@kitco.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)