Word: bbl
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...giant. It's a country nearly paralyzed by an energy crisis. Everywhere, drivers sit in endless lines of cars, sometimes for days, to buy gasoline. Electricity comes and goes. Homes lack fuel for cooking. Iraq's oil industry, which in its heyday produced 3.5 million bbl. a day, now produces little more than 5% of that. Refineries operate at less than 30% of capacity. But the picture belies a deeper reality: Iraq is potentially the most important new player in the global oil market. Although each day brings fresh accounts of breakdowns in the country's crude-oil machinery--fractured...
Falling oil prices allow consumers to spend money they otherwise would have sent to Saudi Arabia. Crude peaked at $37.82 per bbl. in March and had tumbled to $27.35 by last week. Gasoline prices won't come down fast, but prices at the pump are already falling. The drop in oil spending will put an additional $337 in the pockets of the average household by the end of 2004, according to one estimate...
...Crude prices are coming down sharply and should stabilize in the $20-$30 range, from a high three weeks ago of $37.78 per bbl. Friday's price was $26.91. This decline hurts Big Oil--ExxonMobil, ConocoPhilips--but parts of the transportation industry will benefit, especially truckers like Roadway and roadside lodging firms like Cendant, as travelers favor the road over the air. Avoid big airlines. Their cost structures require more business than they're likely to get anytime soon, and even JetBlue and Southwest will struggle. If you think firms like engineering giant Fluor can do well rebuilding Iraq...
...Iraq and this year's cold winter, add another culprit: the Administration's oil policies. That's the charge in a new Senate report produced by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan. After 9/11, Bush developed a plan to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), a 700 million--bbl. store meant to sustain the U.S. in an emergency. Last year 40 million bbl. were added to the SPR. The report states those purchases drove up prices by adding to the demand for oil. An independent analyst says that had the Administration not acted, oil would be selling for just...
Then there's the pipeline from northern Iraq to the Turkish Mediterranean coast, which until recently exported up to hundreds of thousands of barrels a day of Iraqi crude, all of it outside the U.N.-sanctions system. Long dependent on Iraqi oil, Jordan illicitly imports some 110,000 bbl. a day, for which it pays a below-market price directly to the Iraqi government. Yet another pipeline runs from northern Iraq to Banias, a Syrian port, with a second outlet in Lebanon. It currently carries some 230,000 bbl. a day, generating annual revenue estimated at more than $1 billion...