The office of Michigan's chief executive says he issued the declaration Tuesday ``due to the limited availability and temporary shortages of gasoline and diesel fuel.'' The shortage follows a shutdown of the West Shore Pipeline.

AUSTRALIA will increase its dependence on foreign sources of oil with the decision by Caltex to close the Kurnell refinery - the second of Sydney's two oil refineries - with the loss of several hundred jobs.

Industrial society is collectively entering the stage of denial. Over the last six months or so an extraordinary torrent of nonsense about limitless gas and oil supplies has been sloshing through the media, spouting out from an equally extraordinary assortment of people who ought to know better. We’ve seen pundits loudly claiming that the United States had become a net petroleum exporter, when what was going on was that modest amounts of gasoline and other refined petroleum products that Americans are too poor to afford nowadays are being sold to more prosperous countries abroad. A few days ago, in a public appearance Lord Browne, formerly the chairman of British Petroleum and now a major player in the fracking industry insisted that the United States would be able to stop importing foreign oil by 2030, because the supply of shale gas that would be made available to the US by fracking technology was, and I quote, effectively infinite. Ahem. Over the last few weeks, a number of my fellow peak oil writers have expressed worries about this outpouring of counterfactual drivel. Myself, I find it a very hopeful sign. What we are seeing is the shattering...

"The Tokyo metropolitan government will soon seek permission from the national government to send a party to the disputed Senkaku Islands, parts of which the local authority plans to buy from the Japanese owner, a senior Tokyo official said Wednesday." -- I wonder how China will feel about this? -- JB

Alarms sounded Sunday evening and early Monday at the Oi nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture, raising doubts about efforts launched Wednesday to restart the second reactor since the Fukushima nuclear crisis erupted in March 2011.

"Agromars, one of the largest poultry producers in Ukraine has reported losses of 200 mln hryvnias (US$ 24.7 mln) following power cuts across it poultry production facilities. "The power failure disabled the energy across 30 enterprises of the company resulting in the deaths of 618 thousand heads of poultry, and 5 million heads of chickens. The ventilation in poultry houses were disabled for five and a half hours, and the temperature there soon reached 45 degrees, which in turn caused the death of birds. This is a significant loss as the total poultry stock in all enterprises of Agromars is currently estimated at 9 million heads."

A potential labor action in Norway, the largest producer of oil and gas in Western Europe, could add upward pressure on global energy prices.

A nuclear reactor in western Japan began generating electricity at capacity Monday, becoming the first of the country's 50 commercial reactors to return to full service after all were taken offline in May.