Word: crudely
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...radical as it was 11 years ago, Doom looks pathetically crude compared with Carmack's new brainchild. A first glance at a computer screen running Doom 3 is confusing to the eye: the illusion the game creates is so realistic. The secret? Light. Carmack has spent the past four years painstakingly studying optics, and he has figured out how to make photons bounce around in a virtual space in much the same way that they do in the real world. Suddenly, pebbly surfaces cast pebbly shadows. Air ripples from the heat of a broken steam pipe. There is a crispness...
Will the price of gas ever come down? Crude-oil futures, spurred by worries that Russian oil giant Yukos will turn off the spigot, last week exceeded a record $43 per bbl. That's not a high in real terms--oil reached nearly $80 per bbl. in inflation-adjusted dollars after the 1979 Iranian revolution. But it's enough to cause concern that pump prices, already up 50¢ per gal. this year, won't drop much soon. Consumers should get a small break in the fall, analysts say, when demand will ease as the summer driving season ends. Paul Horsnell...
...multinational consortium contracted to exploit the Kashagan field in the northern Caspian Sea - the largest oil and natural-gas deposit to be discovered in the past 30 years. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Kashagan holds between 9 billion and 13 billion barrels of oil. Though crude is not expected to flow before 2008, Kashagan could produce more than 1 million barrels of oil a day by 2015, helping to make the country one of the top-five oil producers in the world. That could be a vital source for the West, especially if the political kinks...
Americans should be watching too. Venezuela, which sits atop 78 billion bbl. of oil--and as much as 270 billion bbl. of extra-heavy crude--is the world's fifth largest oil exporter. It's also a founding member of the OPEC oil cartel (the 11-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). In past decades, to please consumers in the U.S.--PDVSA's biggest market, which buys two-thirds of its exports--Venezuela often ignored OPEC's guidelines, stepping up production even when oil prices hit rock bottom in the late 1990s. But Chavez, a harsh critic...
...sites like Tomoporo and El Furrial, PDVSA hopes to increase daily output to more than 5 million bbl. by 2009, which Rodriguez now knows is critical to staying competitive. Some investors gripe that Chavez's 2001 hydrocarbons law makes it too difficult to participate in the lucrative quality-crude projects. But others praise Rodriguez (and more radical leftists berate him) for reserving more than a quarter of the $37 billion plan--$10 billion--for foreign investment, mostly in extra-heavy crude, marginal oil fields and Venezuela's massive natural-gas reserves. As one foreign oil boss in Venezuela assures skeptics...