Word: winterize
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Anyone who has paid for a tank of home heating oil recently knows the problem is real. Heating oil now costs 67% more than it did a year ago; depleted inventories and high worldwide demand, along with forecasts of a colder than average winter, are expected to boost prices even higher. Last week 111 members of Congress--Democrats and Republicans, mostly from the Northeast and the Midwest--sent a letter to Clinton asking him to deploy the SPR. To dramatize the problem Friday, Gore held an event in Pittsburgh that featured a number of people battered by rising oil prices...
...heating-oil-supply problem stems in part from the fact that domestic refineries spent the summer making gasoline, because doing so ensured high profits. They didn't refine much heating oil because they didn't want to be stuck with large, high-cost inventories if the price dropped before winter. That didn't happen. Crude oil now costs about $10 per bbl. more than it did a year ago, and the domestic heating-oil supply remains dangerously low. So Gore found himself embracing a solution he didn't trust seven months...
...play beforehand--with quiet support lined up from the Saudis as a way to help mute criticism from such OPEC members as Iran. The move is bound to displease those members who want and need high oil prices--countries such as Indonesia that could, as Gore warned last winter, reduce output in response. So the U.S. is treading carefully, describing its plan as a "temporary, precautionary, internal transfer of oil." Clinton and Gore hope that diplomacy has now succeeded in preventing an OPEC backlash, while also sending the signal that America is prepared to take concrete action to lower...
...might be. But easing the burden requires more than a change in the spot price of crude. Domestic refineries are running at about 95% of capacity, and Richardson's estimate that the release could translate into an additional 3 million to 5 million bbls. of heating oil this winter seems optimistic. Since it will take 40 days or more for the oil to work its way from salt cave to refinery to peoples' homes, no one will know how effective the release was until after the election. In that sense, at least, it's a perfect pander for Gore...
...reserve next summer or fall. Prices will probably be lower then, so the companies will actually have to return more oil than they have taken out. Gore also proposes to ease the coming pain by giving a temporary tax credit for distributors who build up their oil stocks before winter and by asking Congress to spend $400 million to help low-income families pay for heating...