Recently in Company doings Category

The study announced by Cambridge Energy Research Associates last week, laying out what it sees as a projected cutback in production due to ongoing cutbacks in capital spending, gets a little more support in the real world every day.

What CERA is writing about hasn't stopped. The CERA report came out Friday, March 27. In the 7-day period surrounding that release, the following developments have been recorded, to help support CERA's theory:

Readers of The Barrel may have noticed the box to the right with Platts' "Tweets" from its new service. We believe that the new Platts' Twitter service can help keep you abreast of various news events over the course of the day.

The three latest Tweets will be posted on this page. But if you want to see more, please check it out here.

It's official--the Golden Age of Refining is kaput.

It's not even 10 a.m. on a Thursday, and here's what has been announced so far today.

There are New Year best wishes -- then there is wishful thinking.

As the air falls out of crude oil prices and 2009 gets forecast by many economists as one of deep recession, you can almost hear the fingers-crossed, wishful thinking from Brazil's Petrobras in their electronic holiday greeting card sent round the world -- as if their PR crew had been goaded into keeping things upbeat. "Happy new era, with good news," said Petrobras's English-language subject line.

I'm participating in a webcast with some of my Standard & Poor's colleagues later this week. As I was preparing slides for it, I wanted to highlight some of the large-scale capital projects that have been delayed because of the combination of lower prices, weaker refining margins and the credit crunch.

I figured I had enough for the slide when I got to five. To find five, I had to go back all of...one week.

Chevrolet's gasoline-sipping plug-in hybrid, the Chevrolet Volt, got an inadvertent introduction on the Web Monday.

A series of pictures of both the car and the development team leaked out, and set off a mini-frenzy among auto bloggers. You can see them here. The off-the-cuff conclusion is that for such a futuristic vehicle, it looks pretty pedestrian.

There are plenty of fascinating tales in a recent lawsuit filed against BP by a former trader, Alison Myers. But it's the dollar signs that have everyone talking.

Time magazine carried an interesting story Friday, on the same day that crude oil posted its biggest one-day jump in history, an increase of about $11/barrel.

Legendary upstream oil investor Richard Rainwater, at least for now, thinks the price has peaked.

With all the noise coming from Congress these days about high gasoline prices and "profiteering" by "Big Oil," you'd think refiners were rolling in cash. But that's not necessarily the case.

What exactly does "Big Oil" mean? Is Sunoco part of "Big Oil?" They lost money in the first quarter. Is Valero Energy? They almost did.