MOSCOW: Russian natural gas monopoly OAO Gazprom said it signed a memorandum of understanding Tuesday with U.S. giant Dow Chemical Co. outlining plans for potential cooperation, including projects in Russia and Germany.

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Mirni Diamond Mine in Siberia holds the title of being the largest open diamond mine in the world.  It is 1200 meters wide and over 500 meters deep.  The sheer size of this is amazing as can be seen in these pictures and also in these pictures.

That we can have such a dramatic effect on the surrounding environment is scary. 

BHP Chief Marius Kloppers has ignored expectations that he would placate the world's most powerful steel industry, promising instead to smash China's preferred iron ore price setting system whether or not he succeeds in swallowing Rio Tinto.

The move demonstrates how a BHP-Rio merger will transform the global commodities trade - and reveals the quietly-spoken, strategic aggression of Mr Kloppers.

He told engineers, steel makers and officials in Beijing yesterday that he would create a new iron ore market place, managed by a third party, which would trade real ore shipments as well as "derivatives" on a futures exchange.

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You've heard the reasons for high oil prices: instability in the Middle East, booming demand in China and India, the sagging dollar. Now add another one to the list: Engineers.
The world doesn't have enough of them. From Alberta to Azerbaijan, the fervent hunt for new reserves of oil and natural gas is running up against a shortage of experienced oil patch professionals. "We anticipate a 10 to 15% shortfall" in the number of veteran engineers and project managers needed to lead the search for new energy supplies, says Candida Scott, director of cost research at Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Royal Dutch Shell and its partners have told the Russian Government that developing vast gasfields in the Siberian Arctic would take half a century of engineering and cost “hundreds of billions” of dollars.

Jeroen van der Veer, Shell’s chief executive, met President Putin this month to discuss the proposed project in the Yamal Peninsula and Kara Sea. He was accompanied by a high-level Dutch business delegation.

They estimated that the region could hold more than 30 trillion cubic metres of gas, more than the combined proved reserves of Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian gas monopoly.

An underground fire that has consumed more than 12.43 million tons of coal in northwest China has finally been extinguished after more than 50 years.

The Coalfield Fire Fighting Project Office of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region announced the fire in the Terak field was finally out, saving an estimated 651 million tons of coal from burning.

Officials and engineers will closely monitor the coal seam for several years and submit a final report in 2009 to regional and national authorities, said Cai Zhongyong, deputy head of the office.

The fire, covering 923,500 square meters, was fueled by coal more than 100 meters underground. It released more than 70,000 tons of toxic gas, including sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide each year since it started in the early 1950s, Cai said.

An similar attempt to extinguish this fire was unsuccessful in Aug 2000

Coal fires are also common in underground mines in the US ,  and are difficult to extinguish. The term coal fire refers to a burning or smoldering coal seam, coal storage pile or coal waste pile. The adsorption of oxygen at the outer and inner surface of coal and resulting oxidation is an exothermic reaction. This leads to an increase in temperature within the coal accumulation. If the temperature exceeds approximately 80°C the coal can ignite and start to burn. This process, referred to as “spontaneous combustion”, is the most common cause for coal fires of large extent.

WOODSIDE has boosted the prospects of engineers developing the $30 billion Browse liquefied natural gas joint venture after signing a long-term sales contract with Taiwan's CPC Corp which could be worth $35 billion to $45 billion.

In a key terms agreement, which has yet to be converted into a final sales agreement, CPC has agreed to buy 2 million to 3 million tonnes of LNG a year for 15 to 20 years.

CPC had publicly flagged the possibility of a deal soon after Woodside signed a very similar agreement with China's PetroChina in September.

SINGAPORE: Oil briefly rose above 99 US dollars a barrel for the first time Wednesday as the greenback's fall drove demand for dollar-denominated crude, dealers said.

The jump during early Asian trading hours pushed the price within striking distance of the psychologically crucial 100-dollar level. Dealers said tight global supplies were also helping fuel the spike.

New York's main contract, light sweet crude for January delivery, pulled back from a new intraday high of 99.29 dollars but was still 94 cents up at 98.97 from a record finish of 98.03 on Tuesday.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia said OPEC shouldn't make oil a source of conflict, contradicting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who wants the oil exporter group to become an active "political agent".

However oil is a powerful political tool as Brazil discovered with the announcement of the biggest deep water oil field off the southeastern coast which has the potential to transform Brazil into a global energy powerhouse and to reshape the politics of this energy-starved continent.

 While Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras, has known of the field for more than a year, it only finished assessing its full potential in recent months. It announced on Nov. 8 that the field held some five billion to eight billion barrels of crude oil and natural gas.

The announcement has everyone in the region, and beyond, taking notice. A field that size — the biggest in the world since a discovery in Kazakhstan in 2000 — is a potential political game-changer for Brazil.

THE market spotlight may soon focus on a Chinese stake in the world's fourth largest iron-ore producer, Anglo American, as investors watch how China will respond to BHP Billiton's massive bid for Rio Tinto.

China Development Bank , one of China's richest and most energetic offshore investment companies, told foreign analysts this week that it has taken a stake in Anglo American, rather than Rio Tinto, as had been reported.

So,  BHP looks to the Chinese as it  pursues the Rio Tinto deal and with theOlympics rapidly approaching -

The value of the ore in one bronze medal at the Olympic Games next summer in Beijing? Just $1. A silver medal? $76. Gold? $230. The value of being the first company designated "Official Diversified Minerals and Medals Sponsor of the Games?"

BHP Billiton will soon find out. BHP, the world's largest mining company, is providing all the ore for the 57,000 medals to be awarded at the 29th Olympiad and the Paralympic Games.

Engineers estimate that for that purpose, BHP will be delivering about 13 kilograms, or 28.6 pounds, of pure Chilean gold, more than a metric ton of Australian silver and almost seven tons of copper - also from Chile - to a mint in Shanghai where the metal will be cast and a ring of jade inlaid to forge each medal.

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Stuck in traffic, behind rows of blinking tail-lights as smoked-glassed Chevrolets sweep down the dual carriageways around you, it would be easy to mistake this sprawling desert city, humming with oil wealth, for somewhere altogether different.

But it is here, amid the palms and neon-lit malls, that Opec heads of state are gathering, for only the third time in the organisation’s 47-year history, to ponder not only high oil prices, but also the purpose of the organisation –engineering,  exploration and whether it has a role beyond trying to massage prices by controlling production.

In many ways, this should be a golden age for Opec. With oil prices close to $100 per barrel, surely its 12 member states, which are responsible for 40 per cent of global crude production of 85 million barrels per day, are enjoying an unprecedented boom?

Not so, according to Opec’s general secretary Abdalla Salem el-Badri.

 THE era of "peak gold" has arrived.

Try as they might, mining engineers cannot find enough ore at viable costs to replace their fast-depleting reserves, even if they dig kilometres into the the Earth.

"There's not much gold out there," said Gregory Wilkins, chief executive of the producer Barrick Gold.

"Global mine supply is going to decrease at a much faster rate than people generally believe. Many of the new mines that people are anticipating will never come into production," he told the RBC Capital Markets gold conference in London

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 Oil engineers continue to seek further exploration as --

 The head of Opec raised the stakes in the battle over high oil prices yesterday when he dismissed a call from the US energy secretary for the producers' group to pump more crude into the market.

Abdalla Salem El-Badri, secretary general of the Organistation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, rejected claims that a worldwide crude shortage was behind the rise in price to nearly $100 dollars a barrel, and added that the US itself could do more to ease its problems.

Samuel Bodman, the US energy secretary, had stepped up the pressure on Opec on Tuesday evening, saying that the group's meeting in Riyadh this week should decide to raise production to help reduce the high oil prices that are threatening to stall economic growth.

Whilst China is taking further steps to alleviate the impact of higher fuel costs 

Complexities abound in the natural gas markets with many twists and turns -

 Environmental engineers and polar bears will watch closely as this develops --

 Mining and engineering stories don't get any bigger than this --

BHP Billiton has come under immediate pressure either to increase the $US140 billion ($A151 billion) value of its scrip-only takeover bid for its arch competitor, Rio Tinto, or abandon its ambition to become the global king of the superbly lucrative iron ore export business.

CHINA'S steel industry was less than thrilled to wake up yesterday and find it might soon be wrestling with two giant iron ore suppliers rather than three in the tightest iron ore market the modern world has seen.

MINING giant BHP Billiton is believed to be ready to offer mining assets to key customer China to try to win Beijing's blessing for a proposed $US140 billion ($151 billion) takeover of key Australian rival, Rio Tinto.

 BHP Billiton’s daydream deal is not quite a monopoly, in terms of its control of the Pacific Basin iron ore market, but it is as near as makes no difference.