Clifford Krauss

Aubrey K. McClendon, who turbocharged the shale revolution by buying up gas fields across the United States, has been charged with conspiring to suppress prices paid for oil and natural gas leases.

Buoyed by low gas prices, Americans are largely eschewing electric cars in favor of lower-mileage trucks and SUVs. Yet the Obama administration has shown no signs of backing off its requirement that automakers nearly double the fuel economy of their vehicles by 2025.

With international sanctions lifted, the Iranian government called on its oil industry Monday to open the taps on production, a move that could add to a global glut of crude that has sent prices into a tailspin.

The oil glut that is piling up despite production cuts has become a quandary and a source of investor anxiety that once again rattled global markets on Friday.

Oil prices plunged again Wednesday by more than 5 percent as investors paid more attention to signs that global stockpiles are growing than to increasing instability in the Middle East and North Africa.

West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark crude, ended trading at $33.97, the lowest since 2009. That’s also just 10 cents more than the lowest point crude fell to during the height of the recession in 2008.

Ever since the 1970s, when international oil boycotts threatened the U.S. economy and produced around-the-block waiting lines at gasoline stations, a ban on oil exports has been at the heart of national energy policy. Now, if a congressional deal holds up and President Barack Obama agrees as is expected, that policy is about to be reversed.

The opening of an investigation of Exxon Mobil by the New York attorney general’s office into the company’s record on climate change may well spur legal inquiries into other oil companies, according to legal and climate experts, although successful prosecutions are far from assured.

The New York attorney general has begun a sweeping investigation of Exxon Mobil to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how those risks might hurt the oil business.

The breakthrough in nuclear talks with Iran on Thursday has the potential to cause a seismic shift in global energy markets over the long term, but energy experts said any appreciable impact on an already glutted global oil market was highly doubtful for at least six months and probably more than a year.

Settling environmental claims that have been languishing in the justice system for more than five years, Anadarko Petroleum said on Thursday that it had agreed to pay the U.S. government more than $5.1 billion to restore thousands of sites polluted by toxins and compensate thousands of personal-injury claimants.

Kerry's Kitchen is where Casselton residents gather for gossip and comfort food, especially the caramel rolls baked fresh every morning. But a fiery rail accident last month only a half mile down the tracks, prompting residents to evacuate the town, has shattered this calm, along with people's confidence in the crude-oil convoys that rumble past Kerry's seven times a day.

Even if President Obama rejects the controversial Keystone pipeline, it might not matter much. Oil companies are already building rail terminals to deliver oil from western Canada to the United States, and even to Asia.

Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell reported sharply lower third-quarter earnings Thursday because of weaker profit margins in refining and a sluggish global economy.

Three years after its disastrous oil rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico, BP has managed to strengthen its finances by divesting itself of less profitable operations, ramping up new oil production in the North Sea and Angola and reducing its exposure to volatile investments in Russia.