Word: petroleum
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Like Chicken Little's warnings that the sky was falling, predictions of an imminent drop in international oil prices have proved premature-so far. Few experts now expect a major price cut soon. Yet all is far from well with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Because world demand for crude oil diminished sharply in recent months, the cartel is feeling the strain of a rapidly building global surplus, and some prices are beginning to crumble around the edges...
Storage tanks in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere are brimming with oil. In some cases, ships are being turned into floating petroleum repositories. Oil-heavy tankers on the long voyage from the Persian Gulf are being ordered to slow down, because there is no place for them to unload...
...from coal. The government and the industry have sponsored several small liquefaction plants but have warned that no commercial liquefaction of coal will be possible before the early 1980s. The Interior Department has estimated that a $2 per barrel subsidy may be necessary to encourage the reproduction of synthetic petroleum...
...coal. Frederich Bergius developed the process for turning coal into crude oil in Germany in 1913, and Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch devised a catalytic process for converting coal directly into gasoline in 1925. During World War II the Bergius and Fischer-Tropsch processes supplied the Nazi government with petroleum, and in late 1945 several German liquefaction plants were dismantled and brought to the United States for study...
...industry and the middle levels of the government energy management bureaucracy should not continue. Anti-trust action directed at the oil companies and the separation of government agencies and the industry will avoid further exclusion of synthetic fuels from the energy market. The recent quadrupling of global petroleum prices has changed oil industry price fixing from an international annoyance to a vital economic issue...