Word: petroleum
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Washington brows are beginning to furrow at the prospect that the U.S. might wind up with not even enough oil for itself, let alone anyone else. The nation depends on Iran for only about 5% of its petroleum needs, but other countries are nowhere near so lucky. Worldwide, Iran normally supplies about 20% of the total petroleum imports of all the consuming nations. Japan usually relies on Iran for 15% of its needs, and Western Europe generally is heavily dependent on Iranian oil, as is Israel, whose oil needs the U.S. has pledged to fulfill in the event of shortages...
...close to the maximum that it is presently possible to pump from the Saudi fields. Iraq, Nigeria and Kuwait have also increased production somewhat. Right now, total world production is off by about 2 million bbl. a day. That is roughly equal to about 4% of global petroleum consumption, or more than enough to supply all the daily needs of Britain or Canada...
...such a situation, refineries should be able to tap emergency supplies from the Government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but the three-year-old program is a shambles. Construction work is far behind schedule at the massive underground salt domes along the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast, where approximately a one-month supply of oil, or 248 million bbl., is supposed to be stored by year's end. So far only about 80 million bbl. of crude-little more than a week's supply-has been stockpiled. What is more, Energy Department technicians are still struggling with technical...
...available crude that is not already committed to customers under long-term contracts. Though the quoted long-term OPEC price currently stands at about $13 per bbl., spot-market oil last week was trading for as much as $17 per bbl. Warns Energy Economist John Lichtblau of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation: "The OPEC countries are free to adjust their prices if they want to, and they could well increase them so that not only will spot prices go up, but official prices as well, at least temporarily." It seems that the energy crisis is turning out to be less...
...regulations to further raise prices--are appalling. When discussing deregulation of competitive industries in his State of the Union address, he shrewdly avoided mentioning his efforts to raise prices in one of the most concentrated, oligopolistic, profitable industries in the economy--big oil. Not only do the top eight petroleum refining companies possess 14.5 per cent of the the market, they also control the other stages of the production process. And as anyone who has taken Ec 10 knows, the oil industry does not fit the classical model of perfect competition. The vertically integraged oligopoly does not set its prices...