Word: bbl
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...frequently bitter two-day session merely papered over conflicts that have been brewing since 1981, when the global recession helped spawn a worldwide oil glut. The 13 member nations agreed to let OPEC's bench-mark crude-oil price stand at $34 per bbl., its level for more than a year. They also approved a 1983 production limit of 18.5 million bbl. per day. That would be about the same amount that members pumped during 1982, but it would be higher than the 17.5 million-bbl. ceiling that OPEC set for itself last March. Said a U.S. oil-company...
OPEC never had to worry about setting individual quotas during the palmy 1970s. The group jacked up the price of oil from $1.35 per bbl. in 1970 to $29 per bbl. ten years later. But the rising prices led consumers to make strenuous efforts at conservation and attracted a flood of capital that went into rinding and pumping oil. As a result, for the first time, in 1982, non-OPEC countries produced more oil than the OPEC nations...
...eager to pump every drop of oil that it can sell, even if that sends prices plummeting. Iran, which has become the spokesman for this group, is spurred by the need to finance its two-year-old war of attrition with Iraq. It is now producing some 3.2 million bbl. daily, nearly three times the 1.2 million-bbl. quota set for it in March...
...World oil supplies are ample, and the price of crude is more likely to sink than spurt. In an effort to raise cash, several members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have been overshooting their production quotas and offering customers discounts off the cartel's $34-per-bbl. official price. "OPEC's quota and pricing system may be on the verge of breaking down," said Board Member James McKie, an economics professor and energy expert at the University of Texas. If that happens, McKie added, oil prices could fall to $20 per bbl. or below...
...which to pay their mountainous debts. Among the most surprising victims were a number of oil-exporting nations: Mexico and Nigeria, to name two. Two years ago, the 13-nation OPEC oil cartel gloatingly held the world at ransom for crude oil at prices that eventually exceeded $40 per bbl. But the combination of recession and conservation caused prices to weaken, and by year's end the price of crude had dropped to $30 per bbl. and appeared to be headed even lower. Unbelievable as it would have seemed to most Americans two years earlier, OPEC's survival...