Word: crude
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
More than a year after the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gal. of crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound, the U.S. still lacks the ability to cope speedily with such disasters. That shortcoming was dramatically illustrated last week when a Greek tanker crashed into three oil barges in the Houston Ship Channel near Galveston. Though Houston handles more crude oil than any other U.S. port, no fast-response cleanup team is stationed in Texas. By the time emergency crews from along the Gulf Coast arrived, 500,000 gal. of crude had leaked into the relatively shallow Galveston...
...shown that someone usually cheats. Oil is particularly easy to sneak through secret channels. U.S. officials believe that the only truly effective course would be to keep Iraqi oil bottled up at the well. This could be done by cutting off the three outlets through which Iraq exports its crude: two pipelines through Saudi Arabia, another leading to Turkey, and ships in the Persian Gulf. Oil-industry and academic experts say Iraq would collapse under such pressure in a few months or a year...
...stabilize OPEC's overall production level. As the so-called swing producer, the rich Saudis would cut back their output to offset the excess pumping of other members. In 1986 the Saudis got tired of playing the sucker and flooded the market with their unrivaled stores of crude, pushing prices down in an attempt to punish the cheaters and force them to play straight. That method proved of little value in taming Kuwait and the U.A.E., which have rich petroleum reserves and tend to favor lower prices as a way of discouraging Western countries from pursuing alternative energy sources...
When Iraq was fighting Iran from 1980 to 1988, Baghdad wasn't bothered by the double-dealing of Kuwait and the U.A.E. Much of Iraq's oil industry was shut down by the war, so crude prices were irrelevant to the country. Baghdad even shared in the two cheaters' profits to the extent that it received $10 billion to $20 billion in loans from them for its war effort. But now that the cease-fire with Iran is two years old, Iraq is rebuilding its oil industry. With an output of 3.14 million bbl. a day, Iraq is tied with...
BUSINESS: Iraq emerges as oil's crude enforcer...