The Weekly Wrap: January 14, 2011

Drilling anywhere, any time: When in a negotiation, ask for the sky; perhaps you’ll get half of it. So it is with the U.S. oil industry’s chief lobbyist, Jack Gerard of the American Petroleum Institute. Interviewed by the Financial Times, Gerard says that the entire United States should be open for oil drilling, without exception. Just months after the unprecedented spill in the Gulf of Mexico, some might regard the position as a bit nervy. Not Gerard. "It is difficult to quantify how much increased production would affect imports," he told the FT, "but if companies had access to all U.S. areas now off limits, a substantial increase in domestic production would be possible." President Barack Obama has revived restrictions on offshore drilling on the U.S. East Coast, and new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has been effectively frozen awaiting a decision on regulation of the area.

Another step toward speculation regulation: Three years ago, investor speculation rapidly drove global oil prices up to $147 a barrel, before it created a plunge to $32 a barrel. Amid another speculation-driven commodities price run-up, U.S. regulators have voted to impose caps on how much speculation a single investor can carry out. The vote in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is not final — that has to come later. But it would place position limits on bets on 28 commodities including oil, gas, gold, and certain foods. Such limits are required by financial-industry regulation approved by Congress last year.

Rare earths workaround: Toyota is trying to bypass a Chinese stranglehold on rare-earth elements by making cars that don’t require them. Last year, China imposed a blockade on shipments of the elements to Japan, which uses them for high-tech products including missiles, windmills, advanced batteries, and hybrid vehicles. But blockades, sanctions, and shortages tend mostly to trigger inventiveness, and Toyota now says that it’s close to a breakthrough in hybrid-electric motors that won’t require rare-earth magnets, reports the Wall Street Journal. Rather than so-called permanent magnets, the motors would rely on electromagnets.

A new sultanate: Elections in the former Soviet Union are almost always scripted affairs — in most cases, everyone knows who is going to win by a landslide before it happens. Such has been the case for the last two decades in oil-rich Kazakhstan, whose winner has always been President Nursultan Nazarbayev. But Nazarbayev appears to be dissatisfied with this state of affairs, and so a move is afoot to allow him to rule for another decade without the formality of the intervening two elections that are on the official calendar. The Parliament has voted to change the constitution to allow a public referendum on the question. If the referendum passes, Nazarbayev would be the first former Soviet leader to wholly dispense with the election charade.