Word: petroleum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While Venezuelan air force helicopters whirred in the sky above and 5,000 soldiers patrolled on the ground below, armed motorcades wound through the clogged streets of Caracas. It was a typical Panavision entrance for the 13 oil ministers of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The price-fixing cartel that had tiptoed onto the stage of international power politics a decade earlier was gathering amidst pomp, pageantry and supertight security to do what it had learned to do best: demand more money...
...goes throughout the Third World. Just as ordinary inflation bites deepest among poor people, the petro-squeeze hurts the yearning, less developed countries (LDCS) most of all. They can afford the painful pinch of rocketing costs for energy and petroleum-based products such as fertilizers and other chemicals much less than affluent industrial nations can. Climbing oil costs consume precious foreign exchange, make it harder to buy farm equipment or factory machinery, and curb development spending on agriculture, industry, education and health...
Cutting back on consumption is not enough. Tanzania uses roughly half as much petroleum as in 1972, but its oil bill has risen 900%, and now eats up half of all earnings from the country's exports. Complains Rodrigo Carazo, President of Costa Rica: "Our 1972 oil needs cost $11.8 million. Our 1979 needs will cost at least $103 million. The barrel of oil that we could buy in exchange for 57 Ibs. of bananas or 3 Ibs. of coffee in 1972 now costs us 440 Ibs. of bananas or 24 Ibs. of coffee...
...Alaska's OCS could eventually produce 4 million bbl. a day, or enough to replace half of the nation's present oil imports. The Canadians, who have been drilling in their sector of the Beaufort Sea for two years, are very bullish on it: this fall Dome Petroleum Ltd. brought in a 20,000 bbl.-a-day strike, the biggest ever made in Canada. But huge expenses (Dome's well cost $70 million), heavy ice, storms and temperatures as low as - 60° F are only some of the hazards confronting U.S. development of the Beaufort...
Company officers are extremely wary of divulging details of their business, and slips can prove costly. Example: much of Saudi Arabia's ability to restrain OPEC from driving up prices has depended on whether the Saudis can convincingly threaten to boost production enough to create periodic petroleum gluts. Yet high Aramco officers are among the few people who know the real size of Saudi Arabia's production capacity. Last spring Exxon and Socal divulged to the Justice Department, in its ongoing anti-trust investigation of the oil industry, that Aramco had little spare capacity. That statement helped...