The idyllic farmhouses of Hampshire County, Egland are prime targets for heating oil theives. (image: holiday-cottages-rentals.com)

Heating oil theft is not a very common occurrence, but it does happen. Tough economic times have driven increasing numbers of desperate thieves to victimize unsuspecting homeowners in recent years draining their heating oil tanks. Such thefts usually occur in rural areas, where shady characters operating a truck or oil pump are more likely to go unnoticed, and the vast majority of the thefts take place in the UK.

In an attempt to reduce heating oil thefts this coming heating season, authorities in Hampshire County, England will soon provide free bottles of a heating oil additive that will “chemically tag” rural residents’ heating oil, the BBC reported on Sunday. The tagging will link the heating oil to its original owner so it can be returned in the event of recovery. The unusual initiative is a reaction to the quadrupling of heating oil thefts in Hampshire last winter.

Ruth Harper-Adams, a local farm advocate in Hampshire’s Test Valley region noted the negative effects of heating oil theft on rural communities:

Fuel theft from farmyards not only has a costly impact, it also creates other huge implications, such as delays in farming operations. It may also create an environmental problem where tank damage is a consequence.

The effectiveness of the tagging systems of course relies on the thieves eventually being caught and the stolen oil recovered, but in an area where heating oil theft is such a serious problem, it seems that almost any preventative measure is worth trying.

An oil trader’s drinking problem pushed the price of Brent crude oil to new highs in 2009. (image: muchomartiniglasses.com)

Oil prices are determined by a number of different factors: supply, demand, currency values, global stock markets, and weeklong drinking binges by oil traders. Steven Noel Perkins, a former oil trader, has been fined £72,000 (US$108,000) for the unauthorized purchase of $520 million worth of Brent crude oil futures contracts—some 7 million barrels—while in the middle of a bender.

Perkins worked for PVM Oil Futures Ltd. and traded on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London. PVM trades on behalf of clients, but Perkins’s trades of June 29 and 30, 2009 were made without any authorization from clients and, according to the British financial regulator FSA, “As a direct result of Perkins’ trading, the price of Brent increased significantly.” Reuters reports that Perkins’s trades pushed the price of Brent crude to a 2009 high of $73.50 a barrel.

Bloomberg reports the full story of the illicit trades, which began on Monday, June 29, 2009. A weekend drinking jag that included a golf trip with PVM lasted into Monday for Perkins, and he phoned in eight trades—only one of them authorized by a client—to a PVM broker that afternoon. The trading continued into the early morning hours of Tuesday, June 30, at which point Perkins had accumulated contracts for 7 million barrels of oil, though he was in no condition to know it. According to a statement from the FSA:

He drank heavily throughout the weekend and continued drinking from around midday on Monday 29 June….He claims to have limited recollection of events on Monday and claims to have been in an alcohol-induced blackout at the time he traded in the early hours of 30 June.

Perkins has since stopped drinking and been to rehab, and his firm, PVM, lost about $10 million closing out the unauthorized trades, but there’s no recourse for consumers who may have paid higher prices for oil products as a result of drunken and unauthorized trades that drove up the market price for Brent crude oil. It’s not the first time we’ve heard of oil traders’ gaffes affecting oil prices and hurting consumers—sometimes mistakes in basic geography drive up prices, and just a year ago another oil trader in London got fined for trades he made after he got drunk at lunch, apparently something of a pattern in the London markets.

Perkins won’t be trading for at least five years—the FSA has banned him—but his case provides some insight into what people mean when they talk about the “complexity” of commodity markets.

EADS’s algae-fueled plane will be making its first public appearance this week in Berlin. (image: eads.com)

The first airplane to fly on a 100-percent algae fuel will take to the air in Berlin this week, reported the news service AFP. EADS, a European aerospace conglomerate that operates Airbus and other aviation subsidiaries, has developed a plane that will run on pure algae-based biofuel and will be showing it off at the Berlin Air Show (ILA) that runs from June 9 to June 13.

The company’s technical director, Jean Botti, said that this is an unprecedented achievement:

At the ILA, we are going to fly for the first time a craft with biofuel that has been made 100 per cent from algae. That is a world premiere.

According to EADS promotional material, the algae biofuel has higher energy content than conventional jet fuel and causes no change in performance.

EADS’s demonstration will be the latest example of algae’s potential as a liquid fuel source with applications not just in airplanes but in diesel engines and home oil heating systems. But despite EADS work on alternative fuels, Botti does not believe algae-based fuels will eliminate the need for petroleum fuels in aviation anytime soon: “If 10 per cent of our fleet is flying with biofuel in 2040, I would be extremely happy.”

Heating oil thieves in England underestimated the ability of one police dog, and were found five miles away from the scene of the crime. (actual dog in question not pictured) (image: wikipedia.org)

Spaldwick is a small village in England, with a little over 500 residents, “a service station, a school, a church, a beauty salon and a pub.”  That doesn’t mean it’s free of troubles, though. Local constables recently arrested four people for the theft of domestic heating oil, and are now holding them in the police station of the nearby town of Huntingdon.

But they couldn’t have done it without the help of their trusted police dog, Guinness. A burglary was reported just before 4:00 am, and while officers searched the area—finding two of the suspected culprits in a van—Guinness picked up a scent and led his handler some five miles away to the village of Brington, where the final two suspects were caught.  Town & Crier, a local newspaper, reported Guinness’ triumph on Friday.

In sum, three men and one woman were arrested and two vans, replete with oil tanks and pumps, were seized.

Perhaps Guinness heard of the heating oil theft that occurred at an animal shelter in Pennsylvania this January, which subjected already vulnerable cats and dogs to chilly temperatures, and took a special interest in this crime. Unfortunately, that shelter in Pennsylvania did not have a valiant police dog such as Guinness to find the perpetrator.

So whether you prefer the adult beverage or the defender of justice, heating oil users have another reason to say, “Guinness is good for you.”

(image: recreatingtampa.com)

]]> http://www.heatingoil.com/blog/heating-oil-thieves-foiled-by-guinness-an-english-police-dog423/feed/ http://www.heatingoil.com/blog/total%e2%80%99s-strike-ends-french-refineries-resume-work224/ http://www.heatingoil.com/blog/total%e2%80%99s-strike-ends-french-refineries-resume-work224/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:32:33 +0000 Michael Hoven http://www.heatingoil.com/?p=13291

Workers continue to strike at Total’s refinery in Flanders, but the walkout ends at all other plants. (image: france24.com)

Workers at five of Total’s six refineries in France voted to end their weeklong strike on Wednesday, allowing shipments and oil processing to resume, reports Bloomberg. Total, the French oil major, planned to permanently close one of its refineries, precipitating the strike, but unions advised workers to end the walkout after Total promised that no other refineries would be closed or sold in the next five years and that refinery workers at the closed plant would find other work within the company.

At the refinery in Flanders, near Dunkirk—the refinery Total plans to close—workers voted to continue the strike until March 8, when Total will present its plans for the future of the plant. Total still intends to close the Flanders refinery, but has said it will build a training center at the site and restructure jobs to keep refinery workers employed with Total. The Flanders refinery has been idle since September, so the continuation of the strike there will not affect oil production.

Total said it would take between two or three days for output to resume, but a representative for the CGT, a French labor confederation, said at Total’s Donges refinery that the plant had tanks full of refined products that were ready to be shipped, according to the AFP. This will help ease fuel shortages in France, where Hundreds of gas stations have run out of fuel due to the strike.

While the walkout has ended, the CGT’s labor coordinator with Total, Charles Foulard, warned Total that “if it doesn’t keep its promises there will be another strike with fuel shortages.”

The Druzhba pipeline system near Mozyr, Belarus. (image: Bymedia.net via rferl.org)

BusinessWeek reported on Friday that talks between Russia and Belarus over an oil imports dispute have ended with the Belarusian delegation walking out. The issue at hand concerns the Druzhba pipeline, which carries Russian oil from Siberia to the European Union across Belarus. The former Soviet state receives about 20 million metric tons of crude from Russia annually, only a quarter of which is used in Belarus, with the rest continuing on to the EU. Until December 31 Belarus enjoyed a 65-percent price discount on those supplies, but now Russia is asking Belarus to fork over full import duties, a change of about $5 billion, or 10 percent of Belarus’s GDP.

Thus far there have been no extended, wholesale shutdowns in the oil supply, a tactic that Russia has exercised in the past in disputes over natural gas with Ukraine, but the continued stalemate doesn’t bode well for oil prices. The spike that started off the new year with crude at $81 per barrel was linked, in part, to anxiety over reports of the dispute. A shutdown of the pipeline would affect not only Belarus, but a large swath of Eastern and Central Europe: Germany receives 15 percent of its oil from the Druzhba, the Czech Republic 50 percent, and Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary 75 percent or more.