Word: crude
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...supposed to be the price rise that would somehow stabilize the chaotically climbing cost of petroleum on world markets. So much for wishful thinking. Instead of a single, stable price for crude, the 13-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries last week gave the oil-thirsting world its worst petro-gouging in more than five years. Rich and poor alike, the oil-importing nations are still struggling to recover from the recession that followed OPEC's huge price rises of 1973 and 1974. The latest assault, which is expected to send an incredible $182 billion cascading into the cartel...
...system technically lifts the official, or "bench mark," price of crude to a record $18 per bbl., up fully 42% since the first of the year. That is the price that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will charge. The other ten OPEC members, which account for almost two-thirds of the cartel's exports, will sell at $20 per bbl. Reason: most are already charging an average of $17.50 per bbl. as a result of premiums and surcharges, and a rise of a mere 500 per bbl. hardly seemed worth the trouble...
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...
Though the cartel made a halfhearted effort to pass off the new price structure as a ceiling on the rising cost of crude, not even the delegates seemed to believe it. With world demand exceeding supply, nations appear willing to pay virtually any price. Said one Indonesian delegate: "We're faced with a shortage of oil that seems irreversible. It is hard to believe that prices can be kept down." The former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, now a private oil-industry consultant, asserts, "The first time that any oil-importing nation offers a price above...
...cartel's fifth largest producer, were to take such a step, the additional squeeze on world petroleum supplies would be devastating. Even though Gaddafi has made bombastic threats before and never carried them out, the shares of Occidental Petroleum and Marathon Oil, both big users of Libyan crude, came under such intense selling pressure on the New York Stock Exchange that trading had to be briefly halted. Only later was it learned that the irresponsible threat was probably inspired by nothing more than pique. Earlier in June, a U.S. State Department mission had turned down a Libyan offer...