Word: petroleum
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Just how prolonged and how severe the U.S.S.R.'s energy gap will prove to be is a subject of widespread discussion. The CIA, in a controversial and criticized report in 1977, predicted that the Soviets would have to start importing petroleum before 1985. The CIA updated that study last year and said that Soviet oil output could fall as low as 8 million bbl. in 1985. If this view is accurate, the Soviet Union will soon have to halt its lucrative oil exports, including 129 million bbl. to such Western nations as Italy, West Germany and Austria. Last year...
...both the East and the West are more optimistic about Soviet potential. Leading Kremlin officials insist that their country will remain a net exporter of oil and natural gas for the next 50 years. Economist Marshall Goldman of Wellesley College maintains in his book The Enigma of Soviet Petroleum: Half Empty or Half Full? that the Soviets will actually increase production of energy by 2% to 3% a year through 1985 and possibly more in the years afterward. Most experts believe that the Soviet Union will eventually solve the difficult problems of extracting its reserves. In a Communist command economy...
Another difficulty is management. Oil experts say that the Soviets have not done a good job of handling their resources. Reports Arthur Meyerhoff, a Tulsa, Okla., oil engineer who has traveled widely in the U.S.S.R.: "To say that the Soviets have mismanaged their petroleum industry is the understatement of the year." Western oilmen say that the Soviets made their first serious mistake when they set drilling targets in terms of meters drilled, thus making a deep dry hole as good as a gusher in terms of fulfilling the plan...
Another serious mistake, say U.S. experts, was deciding to accelerate production by employing a technique known as water injection, whereby water is forced into wells to make the crude petroleum easier to pump. Result: more oil in the short run, but less in the long term. Some older wells in the Volga-Ural region now pump five barrels of water for every barrel of oil; and the average Soviet well pumps 50% water...
...Soviets have not kept up with progress in the petroleum industry, a situation exacerbated by Western trade restrictions, like those imposed by the U.S. after the Afghanistan invasion. Vladimir Dolgikh, the Communist Party secretary for heavy industry, admitted last January that the only way to realize ambitious plans for developing energy sources in Siberia would be "to introduce new equipment, improve technology and raise labor productivity...