Ex-Halliburton czar and US Vice President Dick Cheney left the lofty haunts of Washington, D.C., in mid-July, to sell President George Bush's energy plan to an increasingly skeptical nation. The effort is launched amid allegations of price gouging leveled at gas producers and marketers involved in the California energy fiasco. It is also set against a backdrop of the Bush administration's growing weakness, illustrated tragically by the ease with which the government caved in to demands that large parts of the eastern Gulf of Mexico remain off limits. Some two-thirds of the initially nominated acreage was removed for the Dec. 5 eastern Gulf lease sale. The offering was cut to 1.47 million acres from an original 5.9 million, while estimated reserves on offer were cut 44% to 1.25 Tcf of gas and 185 million bbl of oil.
After an initial victory on his tax-reduction initiative, Bush has come up short on almost every issue, and lost control of the US Senate to boot. That is unfortunate, but it may have a silver lining, of sorts. Although it will make passage of an exploration- and production-friendly energy policy much harder, the increasing influence of the more liberal Democratic legislators could result in the loosening of the myopic trade sanctions with which successive administrations have saddled US industry, especially the oil and gas industry. The threat of sanctions also has been hung over the heads of our friends and allies in a misguided attempt to make them tow the US line. The absolutely ridiculous nature of that coercive buffoonery came to the fore a while back when it was suggested the United States might impose trade sanctions on even its most valued traded partners - and long-time allies - for violating the US stricture that no trade partner engage in a contract valued at more than US $20 million in Iran.
Come on guys, give us a break. Selective animosity is not pretty. Do not trade with Iran, you say, but belly up to the bar with China, which violates more international conventions. Continue to sustain massive balance-of-payment deficits while restricting American participation in lucrative international developments? The rest of the world must be falling down laughing, in between trips to make bank deposits.
It is an indefensible position, one that punishes tiny Cuba - and not so quietly heaps huge sums of cash on dissidents and rebels intent on overthrowing the Castro regime - while allowing Venezuela to collapse under a neo-Communist dictator whose human rights record is approaching that of the Chinese.
There are places where trade sanctions - at least serious ones - are not, and probably will never be, a problem. One of those places in Newfoundland, a lovely little bit of the world with some first-class, ongoing oil and gas development. I spent a pleasant week there at the Newfoundland Offshore Industries Association conference in June. Included in the activities was a trip to the Terra Nova construction site at Bull Arm.
The Terra Nova floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel should be on location and producing by year's end if all goes as planned. It will be followed by an FPSO for the White Rose development, also offshore Newfoundland. Project sanction for the White Rose FPSO is imminent. But an FPSO for White Rose has not been an easy cause. Governmental and local interest groups pushed - hard - from the start for a huge make-work project, one that would employ the largest number of people or, to be more precise, for another giant gravity base structure reminiscent of the Hibernia project. Such a scenario, argued operator Husky, would have destroyed project economics and put the development in serious jeopardy. That did not seem to bother the governmental and special interest groups, but then, it almost never does.

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