On 22 April Mohamed Shoeb, Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company head said that his company unilaterally abrogated its contract to ship natural gas to Israel because of contractual obligations violations.Populist evidence from Egypt indicates that the natural gas agreement was deeply unpopular in the world’s most populous Arab state, and since 2011, the pipeline supplying gas from Egypt to both Israel and Jordan has been attacked 14 times.This is a potentially a major political game changer in the Middle East, overturning more than 30 years…

Read more…

The biggest economic story of the 21st century has been the dramatic emergence in the last decade of the “BRICs” – Brazil, Russia, India and China.Their dramatic emergence onto the world’s global economic stage has produced a middle class in all BRIC countries, whose growing clout wants reliable 24/7 power. The Russian Federation is awash in oil and natural gas, Brazil after the 1973 oil embargo developed ethanol alternatives and last year became an oil exporter, which leave energy and resource-starved China and India scrabbling…

Read more…

Pakistan is deep in a power crisis. Quite aside from distressing domestic consumers, the country’s episodic and erratic electrical generating capacity is also nobbling Pakistani exports. Endemic energy shortages have crippled Pakistan’s textiles industry, which account for 63 percent of Pakistan’s exports and whose mills employ 20 percent of the nation’s workforce. An example. In the past year half of Faisalabad’s 250,000 power looms have gone out of business because of natural gas shortages, which power the looms.…

Read more…

Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya for 41 years before an armed “Arab Spring” uprising last year drove him from power, leading to his death in October 2011. In 1998 Gaddafi shifted his attention away from unequivocal support of Arab nationalist causes and shifted his gaze towards Africa, telling journalists, “I had been crying slogans of Arab Unity and brandishing the standard of Arab nationalism for 40 years, but it was not realized. That means that I was talking in the desert. I have no more time to lose talking with Arabs……

Read more…

It is one of Wall Street’s worst-kept secrets that Chesapeake Energy, America’s second largest producer of natural gas, is short of cash, facing an estimated $9.2 billion gap between its capital expenditures and its cash flow, putting a gun to the head of CEO Aubrey McClendon to sell assets fast. Causing the firm’s fiscal debacle is ironically record low natural gas prices produced by the massive expansion of natural gas in the U.S. from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” causing a highly indebted company built on…

Read more…