Word: bbl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...potential supplies of heavy oil are vast. Venezuela alone has untapped deposits perhaps equal to the total known world oil reserves of 642 billion bbl. But heavy crudes have a much higher sulfur content and less potential energy value than the lighter grades normally used for making gasoline or heating oil. Until recently, energy companies left the heavy oil in the ground because it was too costly to produce and refine into useful petroleum products. But skyrocketing petroleum prices now mean that even heavy oil has become economical; engineering breakthroughs are also making it more profitable...
...adjustment to energy scarcity has been made harsher because markets have not been allowed to operate properly. Only for a brief time during the 1930s were petroleum prices set entirely by supply and demand. The cost of oil: an astonishingly low 100 per bbl. Prodded by the major oil producers, the Texas Railroad Commission began controlling output, thus pumping up the price...
...guarantee that long-term prices will remain firm, and even nudge up. The latest to institute the price-propping cuts are Kuwait and Libya, which last week reduced their production by 25% and 17%, respectively, bringing the overall drop in OPEC'S output to 2 million bbl. per day below the autumn 1979 level of 31 million bbl. daily. Some price hikes continue nonetheless. Algeria has put a $3-per-bbl. surcharge on its crude, euphemistically calling it a "down payment against future explorations...
Typical of the new trend was Kuwait's announcement two weeks ago that it is cutting the amount of crude sold to British Petroleum from 450,000 bbl. per day to 150,000 bbl. Earlier, Kuwait had agreed to increase sales to the two largely state-owned French oil companies by 85,000 bbl. daily. Said Kuwait's Oil Minister Ali Khalifa Al Sabah after the decision: "If the oil companies don't like it, they may buy their oil elsewhere...
...property of inestimably greater material value to the scepter'd isle. In The Samson Strike by Tony Williamson (Atheneum; 250 pages; $9.95), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine sets out to capture a vast oil platform in the North Sea that can pump 400,000 bbl. a day from its undersea wells. Unless the terrorists win the release of all political prisoners in Europeplus ?57 millionthey will waste the $400 million platform and set fire to the huge gushers of oil under the so-called Samson rig. The flames, engulfing other oilfields, will...