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New Delhi: Cairn Energy, the Scottish exploration group, said yesterday it would begin pumping its first oil from a huge field in Rajasthan this week, a decade after taking a gamble on the area.

Yes, the Lockerbie bomber's release is sordid, but our interests are best served by improving ties and cutting oil deals.

Deep Yellow Limited (Deep Yellow) has updated on its drilling at Mount Isa Project, Australia. Initial XRF chemical assays (cU3O8) and downhole gamma results (eU3O8) from RC drilling at the Queens Gift Prospect are confirming and extending uranium mineralisation intersected in 2007-08 programmes. The first phase of reverse circulation (RC) drilling on the Bambino and Thanksgiving Prospects has been completed.

State-run BHEL, a power generation equipment maker, has bagged a turnkey contract for constructing a gas turbine-based captive power plant in Assam, from Oil India Limited (OIL).

The American age of oil began 150 years ago today. Or, if you prefer the phrasing of President George W. Bush, the U.S. addiction to oil can be traced back to the original pusher "Colonel" Edwin Drake who began producing oil from the first commercial well near Titusville, Pa., (about 100 miles north of Pittsburgh). [More]

San Antonio-based Tesoro Corp. has shipped the first barrels of crude oil through the reversed 81-mile Pertoterminal de Panama trans-Panamanian pipeline, which runs from the Atlantic Ocean side of the Isthmus to the Pacific. (TSO)

Qatari Oil Minister Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah urged OPEC to keep crude production targets unchanged when member states meet next month as economies struggle to recover from a recession.

UAE-based oil and gas engineering services firm Lamprell has reported a 34% drop in first-half profits compared to the same period last year, following lower demand for offshore construction and repair services, MEED has reported. Net profit fell to $31.6m, down from the $47.8m in H1 2008 and revenues were down 18.2% to $259.9m. Booked orders for the company's services totalled $417m in June 2009, down 49% from $818m in 2008, although prospective orders were at their highest level in Lamprell's history, Nigel McCue, Lamprell's CEO said. [AMEInfo.com]

Even as industrial civilization reaches into the farthest corners of the globe to extract resources such as oil, timber and fish, environmentalists are striving to mitigate its deleterious effects on the biosphere. Projects to reduce pollution, prevent climate change and protect biodiversity, however, are drawing criticism that they could drive indigenous people off their lands and destroy their livelihoods.Conservationists have historically been at odds with the people who inhabit wildernesses. During the last half of the 20th century, millions of indigenous people in Africa, South America and Asia were ousted from their homelands to establish nature sanctuaries free of humans. Most succumbed to malnutrition, disease and exploitation, recounts anthropologist Michael Cernea of George Washington University. Such outcomes--coupled with the realization that indigenous groups usually help to stabilize ecosystems by, for instance, keeping fire or invasive weeds at bay--have convinced major

(Rice University) A new policy paper by Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy shows a clear increase in the size and influence of noncommercial traders, or 'speculators,' in the oil futures market since regulations were eased by the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Speculators now constitute about 50 percent of those holding outstanding positions in the US oil futures market.