Oil

PetroChoice Holdings Inc., a Bucks County lubricant distributor, has purchased Craft Oil Corp. of Avoca, Pa. for an undisclosed sum, said Shane O'Kelly, the chief executive of PetroChoice. It was the fourth acquisition this year by PetroChoice, which was founded in 1969 in Bedford County and has been based in Bristol since it acquired Loos & Dilworth Inc. in 2009. PetroChoice provides petroleum-based lubes and services in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest Regions.

WASHINGTON - It's a decision President Obama put off during the 2012 campaign, but now that he has won a second term, his next move on a proposed oil pipeline between the United States and Canada may signal how he will deal with climate and energy issues in the four years ahead. Obama is facing increasing pressure to determine the fate of the $7 billion Keystone XL project, with environmental activists and oil producers each holding out hope that the president, freed from the political constraints of reelection, will side with them on this and countless other related issues down the road.

Coal trains stopped trundling over Darby Creek into Exelon Corp.'s Eddystone generating station some time ago, after the utility announced plans to retire its coal-fired power generation units. By this time next year, a train could begin rolling in daily to Eddystone carrying Bakken crude oil from North Dakota for use at Philadelphia-area refineries. On Monday, Enbridge Inc. , of Calgary, Alberta, said it has agreed with a Philadelphia-area partner to form the Eddystone Rail Co. and convert the train facility at the generating station from one capable of handling coal hoppers to tank cars.

NEW ORLEANS - As crews searched Sunday for a worker still missing after an oil-platform explosion and fire, doctors said that one of four men burned in the blaze is improving and is now in fair condition. Two remained in critical condition and one in serious condition, doctors say. The company that owned the platform that caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico pledged Sunday to keep searching for a second worker still missing after a body was found in about 30 feet of water near one leg of the platform.

NEW ORLEANS - Two oil workers remained lost at sea Saturday, a day after a torch being used to cut an oil pipe ignited a blaze that severely burned four others workers on a production platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The four burned workers are in critical but stable condition. Meanwhile, officials said no oil was leaking from the charred platform, a relief for Gulf Coast residents still weary two years after the BP oil spill illustrated the risk offshore drilling poses to the region's ecosystem and economy.

VENICE, La. - Coast Guard officials said an oil rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana, sending four people to hospitals Friday. Two others were believed to be missing.  Petty Officer 3rd Class Jonathan Lally, a spokesman for the Coast Guard, did not immediately have information on the conditions of those taken to hospitals.  The rig, a production platform owned by Black Elk Energy, is about 25 miles southeast of Grand Isle, La.  ...

NEW ORLEANS - A day of reckoning arrived for BP on Thursday as the oil giant agreed to plead guilty to a raft of charges in the deadly Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico and pay a record $4.5 billion, including the biggest criminal fine in U.S. history. Three BP employees were also charged, two of them with manslaughter. The settlement with the federal government came 2 1/2 years after the fiery drilling-rig explosion that killed 11 workers and set off the nation's largest offshore oil spill.

WASHINGTON - Climate change is suddenly a hot topic again. The issue is resurfacing in talks about a once-radical idea: a possible carbon tax. On Tuesday, a conservative think tank held discussions about it while a more liberal think tank released a paper on it. And the Congressional Budget Office issued a 19-page report on the different ways to make a carbon tax less burdensome on lower income people. A carbon tax works by making people pay more for using fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas that make heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester) is suing officials in West Deptford, his hometown, alleging that they let two oil companies skirt an environmental cleanup law in exchange for money to buy two fire trucks. The lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in Gloucester County, argues that the mayor and township council "willfully ignored" a law designed to prevent companies from leaving a polluted site without first paying the state for environmental cleanup. In a June e-mail exchange, a lawyer for Sunoco pledged that the oil company would pay $1 million toward West Deptford's purchase of two fire engines if the township awarded it $13.9 million for a property tax settlement and withheld nothing for cleanup in accordance with the pending law, according to the lawsuit.

LONDON - The next archbishop of Canterbury will be officially introduced Friday, the British government says, and the expectation is that the new leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans will be former oil company executive Justin Welby. Welby, 56, made an unusual midcareer shift from the oil industry to the clergy. He has said he faced conflicts between his beliefs and how companies acted - and has made business ethics and standards part of his work. "I don't believe in good human beings," Welby said in an interview with the Guardian in July.