Word: petroleum
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Mexico, Britain, Ecuador, Malaysia. The list of oil-exporting nations that have cut their prices keeps growing longer. After years of feasting on high prices brought on by petroleum scarcity and soaring demand, the oil-producing states are discovering that the price of crude can go down as well as up. Drooping demand and a steadily swelling surplus production of some 2 million bbl. per day have created a miniglut that grows bigger by the week...
From the oilfields of Southeast Asia to the offshore drilling rigs of North Africa and the North Sea, petroleum prices are being pruned, pared and sometimes slashed as exporting nations find themselves scrambling to hold on to customers. Not even last week's Israeli air attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor outside Baghdad did much to firm up the weakening price of crude. Though sporadic calls for an oil embargo of the U.S. echoed through the Arab world, petroleum prices stayed stagnant on the bellwether spot market, where much of the world's current excess is traded...
Prices are sliding in large part because Saudi Arabia, which produces 10.3 million bbl. of crude oil daily, or 40% of all the output of the 13-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is intentionally forcing them lower. As longtime champions of steady, but moderate, rises in the price of oil, the Saudis have refused to mimic price hawks like Libya, Iran and Iraq. Instead, the Saudis for the past nine months have been pumping nearly 2 million bbl. per day above their self-imposed limit of 8.5 million bbl. daily in order to create an oil surplus and drive...
...some oil-importing nations, the weakening price of crude means an abundance of troubles for many oil exporters. Nations like Nigeria, Iran and Libya have year after year pushed the price of crude to ever higher peaks in order to finance ambitious development programs. Now the sagging demand for petroleum is crimping export earnings, cutting into government revenues, and in some cases even beginning to threaten the continuation of many big industrialization projects...
...Saudis had to help tighten the market by cutting production and raising prices. For the past eight months Saudi output has crested at 10.3 million bbl. daily, or about 2 million bbl. more than the desert kingdom produced three years ago. This is a key reason why worldwide petroleum inventories are now bursting with some 2 million bbl. daily in excess crude oil output...