Sometime in the next 12 months, an energy IPO offering in distant Mongolia already has foreign investors salivating.

The darling of the international energy community is coal company Erdenes-Tavan Tolgoi ("Five Hills") Ltd., popularly known as TT, which has yet to begin operations.

To give an idea of the potential foreign interest, analysts believe that the IPO will be handled by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG.

What is TT bringing to the market that has caused such interest? A massive deposit located in the east Tsankhi area of the Gobi desert and estimated to hold over 6.4 billion metric tons of coking coal, the world's biggest untapped deposit of its kind.

Twentieth-century American military history has two iconic dates - 7 December 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor and 6 June 1944, D-Day, when the liberation of Europe began.

The subsequent vicious Allied fight from Normandy to Germany saw the Nazis largely fueled by a technology that is now being promoted by the Republican Congressional leadership, in collusion with its munificent fiscal campaign energy supporters, as a way to lessen U.S. dependence on energy imports.

Tired of high gasoline pump prices? Wondering why, with our fearsome energy hunger, all the energy seems to be in the Middle East?

That was yesterday's story.

Almost overnight -- well, in a few short years -- the energy picture has been changing in the US. We are not energy beggars anymore. We have energy bounty -- and that does not include the energy from wind and sun, or the controversial energy from the atom.

Now we have plenty of the most versatile of the hydrocarbons -- more versatile than coal, and oil. It is natural gas; and it is going to change the face of America remarkably quickly, whether it is used to make electricity for electric cars or is burned directly in cars.

There is a piece of doggerel which goes:

They said it couldn’t be done.
So I went right to it -- that thing they said
Couldn’t be done.
And I couldn’t do it.

And that is the way it has been with presidents since the 1973 oil crisis. All of them -- from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, who has just joined the club -- have wrung their hands and exhorted Americans to use less oil in general and less foreign oil in particular.

Nixon had his commerce secretary, Peter G. Peterson (he of enormous wealth these days), promise far reaching and revolutionary “initiatives” to tame our thirst for oil. But Nixon was out of office before these palliatives were revealed.

China is the key to the metals markets today. And there are some important signals about this market registering in the last few weeks.

Last month, I wrote about diverging global shipping indexes. The Baltic Dry Index, which tracks global shipping rates, has been falling the last several weeks. While the China Containerized Freight Index, tracking solely Chinese shipping prices, has been on a tear. The CCFI is up 12% since the beginning of January.

This could indicate an increase in goods being shipped out of China these days. And those goods might be metals. A few weeks ago, odd shipments of aluminum started showing up at ports in northwest Japan. Speculation is these sailed from Shanghai.
Full article at: China Steel Shipments

The power of oil as a political weapon became evident during the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict that became known as The October War in the Arab world and the Yom Kippur War in Israel. Hoping to sway Western sentiments in favor of the Arab cause Arab oil producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikdoms agreed to reduce their output. Naturally, less oil on the market meant higher prices at the pump and for the home consumer of heating oil. The Arab oil embargo forced Western governments to enact strict measures in order to safeguard oil reserves.

The tactic employed by the oil producers however backfired:
Full article at: Oil and Politics>

Is the term “clean coal” an oxymoron? That’s a hot question for politicians, the energy industry and environmentalists, alike. While the words seem intuitively clear, the meaning of the term, as well as the feasibility of improving coal’s environmental impact, are in question.

First, some background. Coal is the major source of America’s energy. In fact, it provides half of the electricity produced in the U.S. However, its combustion is responsible for over 1/3 of our carbon dioxide emissions. With CO2 being targeted as one of the major causes of climate change, the coal industry has come under fire.

In response, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a coalition of businesses including some of the country’s largest coal mining companies, electric utilities and railroad owners, is actively promoting what it calls “clean coal.” Through a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, sponsorship of two presidential debates, and ongoing lobbying of high level governmental officials and candidates, it has turned the term into a household word, albeit one that is little understood.