Word: bbl
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After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, oil prices spiked to $40 per bbl., creating anxiety among consumers and a recession for then President George Bush. Now his son is taking steps to make sure history does not repeat itself. The Bush Administration has been quietly pumping as much as 150,000 bbl. of crude oil a day this fall into the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The unheralded buildup has brought emergency stockpiles of petroleum to their highest level in history: nearly 600 million barrels. That ensures that in the event of war, President Bush can order the release...
...stockpiles. Even the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is doing its part: heavyweights such as Saudi Arabia have opened the taps, helping America fill the reserve's salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana with crude. U.S. oil prices, meanwhile, have fallen 15% since late September, to around $26.50 per bbl. --By Adam Zagorin/Washington
...that if it hadn't decided that we have to deal with this guy," says a U.S. official in Latin America. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Roy Chaderton Matos, concurs: "Our channels of communication [with the U.S.] are suddenly multiplying now." So much so that Venezuela, which already exports 1.54 million bbl. a day to the U.S., has just begun negotiating a 20-year oil-delivery deal with Washington and just opened its vast natural gas fields to about $4 billion worth of U.S. and foreign investment. Still, the U.S. does not expect an easy partnership with Chavez, who as a paratrooper...
...coal into diesel fuel and gasoline, coal-rich countries such as the U.S., China and Germany could depend far less on imported oil. At the same time, acid-rain pollution would be reduced because the liquefaction strips coal of harmful sulfur. Given current world oil prices (about $27 per bbl.), turning coal into gas is economical in China. "A $4-to-$8-per-bbl. increase in the price of oil would make it economically attractive in the U.S. too," says Theo Lee, CEO of Hydrocarbon Technologies...
...want to shrink their own markets." The Saudis could conceivably decide that they would no longer use their excess capacity--as they do now--to smooth out market volatilities. Partly because of uncertainty as to Saudi intentions, the benchmark price of crude oil rose 34%, to $26.64 per bbl., from February to late April. Still, it remains far below its average price in 2000. (Crude oil today is, in real terms, barely half the price it was at the time of the first oil shock...