Word: baseness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...them had awaited with dread. On the other side of the globe in Geneva, the OPEC ministers had once again jacked up the world price of oil, and the bite was fully as bad as gloomy prophets had predicted?and perhaps worse. The cartel's complex system of base quotes and surcharges works out to an average price of between $20 and $21 per bbl.?up 15% just from last week, 50% since Jan. 1, and 1,000% from the $1.80 price at the start...
Whatever the new base level, all members will also get to charge so-called differential premiums of up to $3.50 per bbl. The differentials, which traditionally have been set at no more than a small fraction of the base price, are supposed to be applied solely to specially attractive crudes, such as Nigeria's and Libya's low-sulfur oil, which is now much in demand for refining into gasoline. Veteran observers of past OPEC behavior expect the differentials soon to be turning up as part of the price for almost any grade of cartel crude...
...Geneva, Yamani did his best to persuade the cartel to hold the line at $18 per bbl. At one point, the Harvard-educated sheik grew so frustrated with the demands of Iran, Libya and Algeria, which were calling for a base price of at least $25 "to $26 per bbl., that he threatened to walk out of the conference. That led OPEC Chairman Mani Said Utaiba, of the United Arab Emirates, to convene a rump meeting in his private upstairs suite. It was during that gathering, at which Utaiba served dates from his home country and Arab spiced tea, that...
...seems simple so far, but the rules require 400 pages of DOE instructions. Allocations are expressed not in gallons but as a percentage of what each individual customer, wholesaler and retailer, received in a given base period. What base period? Well, it can differ from customer to customer. The oil companies must work out not only how much they supplied each customer in the same month of last year but also how much they supplied, on average, in a five-month period from October 1978 to February 1979. If the latter is at least 10% higher than the corresponding month...
...program has been altered since the shortages began to get bad-the state set-aside was boosted from 3% to 5% so that spot shortages could be eased, and the five-month-average base was introduced in an effort to deal with seasonal population shifts-but the problems have not been solved. Criticisms are now mounting; last week the state of Maryland filed a lawsuit against DOE, challenging the allocation system as unfair. Says Economist Walter Heller: "I've heard it said that if God wanted us to have gasoline, he would never have created the Department of Energy...