Word: bbl
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...industry that normally plans on a 15-to-20-year schedule. The world of energy economics, though, was about to change. After the second oil shock, in 1979, which followed the overthrow of Iran's Shah, the price of OPEC crude reached as high as $40 per bbl. Energy consumers reacted to the staggering prices by conserving fuel in a way that had never been imagined. Demand for electricity increased by only 1.7% in 1980 and .3% in 1981 and actually shrank 2.3% in 1982. That was the first decline in power use since the end of World...
...jurisdiction.-The decision, written by Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, involves 29 tracts, totaling 165,000 acres, in the Santa Maria basin off the California coast between Morro Bay and Point Conception, northwest of Santa Barbara. Geologists have estimated there may be as much as 1 billion bbl. of oil in the entire basin. The sections had initially been freed up for lease by the Interior Department in 1981. But California managed to block the proposed arrangement on the ground that the Interior Department had refused to determine whether the leasing met the state's stringent environmental...
...decision was a victory for the Reagan Administration and oil interests. Both have been seeking quicker access to the vast wealth of the continental shelf, an estimated 44 billion bbl. of oil, nearly half again as much as all proven reserves. (The U.S. gets about 10% of its domestic production from offshore wells.) However, Clark immediately moved to reassure the coastal states and environmentalists. Under his stewardship, he said, the Interior Department will seek to avoid the battling that characterized the offshore-leasing program in the past, even while it continues to pursue essentially the same pro-development policies...
Under Watt, many of these concerns were either ignored or minimized. Interior officials liked to point out that natural underwater seeps off California's Coal Oil Point, near Santa Barbara, alone released at least four times as much oil as the 5,700 bbl. spilled annually in offshore production within U.S. waters. In July 1981, as a matter of highest national priority, Watt announced a program to lease nearly all of the outer shelf, a total of a billion acres, in five years. He offered up huge tracts (as much as 40 million acres at a time...
That Pennzoil-Getty accord, though, drew the attention of Texaco, based in White Plains, N.Y., which has also been looking for new supplies of crude oil. Texaco's total petroleum pool shrank 25% between 1979 and 1982, to about 1.9 billion bbl. With the addition of Getty's supply, Texaco's reserves would double...