Word: gas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...idea of blocking refined gas to Iran was raised several times during last year's U.S. presidential campaign. Barack Obama described the plan in a debate with John McCain as "putting the squeeze" on Ahmadinejad. In April the U.S. Senate introduced the bipartisan Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, which would expand sanctions imposed by Bill Clinton in 1996 and give the White House the authority to sanction companies that export gas to Iran. Senator Joe Lieberman told reporters at the time that the law would "target Iran's Achilles' economic heel, which is its dependence on imports of petroleum ... most...
Iran sits atop mammoth energy reserves -about 136 billion bbl. of oil and some 14 trillion cu m of natural gas. But because its refineries are too few and too old, the country refines just two-thirds of the gas it needs to keep its economy working and its 65 million people lit, driving and heated. The remaining third - about 120,000 bbl. a day - has to be imported...
...last month, according to the Financial Times. Lawrence Eagles, head of commodities research at JPMorgan, told the paper last week that Iran was importing 30,000 bbl. to 40,000 bbl. a day from Chinese companies. And Malaysia's state-owned oil company Petronas delivered three shipments of gas to Iran last month, each containing about 93,000 bbl., according to Stratfor. (See a brief history of sanctions...
...from certain that Chinese and Malaysian companies would bend to the same pressures that Western firms have to stop exports to Iran. Even if they do, Iran has other options. For one thing, gas-guzzling Iran could cut its consumption. As any visitor can testify, driving across Tehran can take hours in clogged traffic, which barely eases up at night. That's because Iran's regime, keen to keep voters happy, heavily subsidizes gas. Iranians are entitled to 26 gal. (100 L) of fuel a month at 38 cents per gal. (about 10 cents per L) - a tiny fraction...
...then there's smuggling. Ahmadinejad could - perhaps easily - boost his gas supplies by cracking down on rampant smuggling. About 10.6 million gal. (40 million L) of gas are smuggled out of the country daily to neighboring countries like Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and Turkey, where it is sold at higher prices, according to Iranian officials. "In some border regions, smugglers are using underground pipelines up to the frontiers," the ministry's director of economic affairs, Mohammed Reza Farzin, told an Iranian newspaper last week, explaining the difficulties of stopping the smuggling networks. (Read "Power to Chaos - Tracking Iran's Four-Month Slide...