Word: maria
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...fable of the decline of the Western world. But as a short-story writer, she achieved the violent grace of a folk ballad. Something atavistic, something frontier-Texan came out in her. The sentences cut, like the wife's knife stabbing her husband's lover in "Maria Concepcion," like the farmer's ax splitting the head of his tormentor in "Noon Wine...
...Santa Maria basin is just 40 miles from the site of the 1969 disaster off Santa Barbara, where an oil well blew off a piece of the sea floor and coated miles of California beaches and thousands of sea birds with sticky crude. So far, environmentalists have not tried to block drilling activity at the new discovery site. Says John Zierold, chief lobbyist for the Sierra Club in California: "We have to await the results of some tests. We're not going to shoot from the hip on this...
Concern over pollution is one reason the Santa Maria basin was not explored sooner. Only since Interior Secretary James Watt took office in January 1981 have oil companies been encouraged to explore aggressively for new reserves in undeveloped areas. Their recent successes have come after the highly publicized and expensive failures at Georges Bank off the Massachusetts shore and the Baltimore Canyon off New Jersey. Experts have known of petroleum deposits in the California basin for years, but ignored them because early tests showed, inaccurately, that the oil was heavy and hard to refine...
Despite its size, the new find is nearly invisible on a world scale. Should it produce as much as 250,000 bbl. per day (Prudhoe Bay pumps out 1.5 million bbl. daily), the Santa Maria basin would still account for a mere 3% of total U.S. demand. Yet it is part of an encouraging trend that has seen the discovery of new oil in the non-Communist world begin to outstrip consumption. Since 1979, the Western nations have added 112.2 billion bbl. to proven reserves, while they have burned up just 49.4 billion...
More important, the Santa Maria basin will help further reduce the U.S.'s dependence on foreign oil once commercial production begins in 1986. The effects of the discovery may be felt as early as next month's meeting in Vienna of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. According to Oil Analyst Dan Lundberg, editor of the Lundberg Letter, the offshore gusher could lead to more unofficial price cutting by dissident OPEC members, weakening the links in the powerful cartel...