Twenty-two senators wrote a letter to the president when he was said to be on the fence about backing out. They received more than $10m from oil, gas and coal companies the past three election cycles.

Political instability may be growing in Saudi Arabia as King Salman bin Abdulaziz begins to overhaul the Saudi government amid a volatile energy market. By Cyril Widdershoven.

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill did $17.2 billion in damage to the natural resources in the Gulf of Mexico, a team of scientists recently found after a six-year study of the impact of the largest oil spill in U.S. history. This is the first comprehensive appraisal of the financial value of the natural resources damaged by the 134-million-gallon spill. “This is proof that our natural resources have an immense monetary value to citizens of the United States who visit the Gulf and to those who simply care that this valuable resource is...

In the scorching heat of the Caribbean Sea, workers in scuba suits scrub crude oil by hand from the hull of the Caspian Galaxy, a tanker so filthy it can't set sail in international waters.

A December oil pipeline spill in western North Dakota might have been three times larger than first estimated and among the biggest in state history, a state environmental expert said Friday. About 530,000 gallons of oil is now believed to have spilled from the Belle Fourche Pipeline that was likely ruptured by a slumping hillside about 16 miles northwest of Belfield in Billings County, Health Department environmental scientist Bill Seuss said. The earlier estimate was about 176,000 gallons.

Royal Dutch Shell's Nigeria subsidiary "fiercely opposed" environmental testing and is concealing data showing thousands of Nigerians are exposed to health hazards from a stalled cleanup of the worst oil spills in the West African nation's history, according to a German geologist contracted by the Dutch-British multinational. An environmental study found "astonishingly high" pollution levels with soil "literally soaked with hydrocarbons," geologist Kay Holtzmann wrote in a letter to the Bodo Mediation Initiative.

Some 1.2 billion barrels of oil have been discovered in Alaska, marking the biggest onshore discovery in the U.S. in three decades. The massive find of conventional oil on state land could bring relief to budget pains in Alaska brought on by slumping production in the state and the crash in oil prices.

The Kremlin says that Russian President Vladimir Putin has met with the new head of U.S. oil company ExxonMobil. Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on March 10 that Putin met with ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods the previous day. "This is a very big company and it is a major investor. This is why it receives special treatment," Peskov said.

The oil and gas industry risks losing public support if progress is not made in the transition to cleaner energy, Royal Dutch Shell Plc Chief Executive Ben van Beurden said on Thursday. The world's second largest publicly-traded oil company plans to increase its investment in renewable energy to $1 billion a year by the end of the decade, van Beurden said, although it is still a small part of its total annual spending of $25 billion.

Two days before the Trump administration approved an easement for the Dakota Access pipeline to cross a reservoir near the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe reservation, the U.S. Department of the Interior withdrew a legal opinion that concluded there was “ample legal justification” to deny it. The withdrawal of the opinion was revealed in court documents filed this week by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the same agency that requested the review late last year.

Australian taxpayers will be forced to subsidise the clean-up costs of oil spills in the Great Australian Bight thanks to the terms of the controversial petroleum resource rent tax. Treasury officials have confirmed that oil companies would be able to claim a tax deduction under the PRRT for expenses incurred cleaning up oil spills. Different “uplift rates” would apply to clean-up costs depending on whether the spills resulted from exploration or production activity.

As with many industries now fretting over the uncertain future of U.S. trade policy, the oil business is sizing up the potential impact of the various protectionist measures being bandied about Washington - which have sent crude markets into a tizzy.

Workers were expected to complete cleaning up Thursday about 140,000 gallons of diesel fuel that spewed from a broken pipeline onto an Iowa farm, the largest U.S. diesel spill since 2010, federal authorities said. Vacuum trucks were sucking up the fuel that spilled onto an acre of grass and tilled farmland when the pipeline broke.

The latest battleground for the future of fracking in Britain looks set to be Sherwood Forest, the legendary home of folk hero Robin Hood and now the target of a seismic survey by the chemical multinational Ineos. Ineos, which moved its headquarters back to Britain last month, appears to have agreed terms with the Forestry Commission to start burying seismic charges and spend up to two years searching for shale gas. Campaigners have called on the government to block any possible fracking and protect the forest.

"The standard model of the future accepted through most of the peak oil scene started from a set of inescapable facts and an unexamined assumption, and the combination of those things produced consistently false predictions." By John Michael Greer.

OPEC and non-OPEC producers on Saturday reached their first deal since 2001 to curtail oil output jointly and ease a global glut after more than two years of low prices that overstretched many budgets and spurred unrest in some countries.

Brent crude oil rose above $55 a barrel on Monday, trading at a 16-month high, on rising prospects of a tightening market after OPEC agreed a landmark deal to cut production last week.

OPEC has agreed to cut 1.2 million barrels a day from its present output — the first cutback in eight years —after its 14 members put aside differences to agree on individual production levels.

Black, ant-like figures crown a russet hill ringed by the Cannonball River at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. Soon they come into focus: dozens of policemen in full riot gear, stationed on high ground so as to better surveil the handful of people lingering in the aftermath of what Native Americans protesting a new oil pipeline and their allies call a "direct action," or a confrontation with the law.

A vast field of shale rock in West Texas could yield 20 billion barrels of oil, making it the largest source of shale oil the U.S. Geological Survey has ever assessed, agency officials said. The Wolfcamp Shale geologic formation in the Midland area also contains an estimated 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, the agency said in a release.