Word: oiled
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...Even before the auction, analysts warned that Iraq's plans for attracting the investment necessary to crank up its output were overly optimistic. Iraq plans to retain ownership of its oil, but make long-term agreements with foreign companies to run the operations. But Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani demanded that oil companies lower their profit expectations, offering to pay them $2 for every barrel pumped in Iraq rather than the $4-a-barrel rate sought by oil executives. Chevron, which had negotiated for a year to develop Iraq's second-biggest field, West Qurna, pulled out of the deal...
...notion that the invasion of Iraq was simply an oil grab took another hit on Tuesday when Baghdad opened the bidding on the rights to develop its massive energy reserves. In a day-long auction of eight huge oil fields - some of the world's biggest - virtually all the 41 foreign companies invited to bid by the Iraqi government balked at the Baghdad terms. The only contract signed was a 20-year deal for a consortium led by BP and China's National Petroleum Corporation to develop the giant Rumaila field in southern Iraq. "Frankly I did not think...
...Iraq remains enormously tantalizing for Big Oil, whose prospects for tapping huge new fields around the world are shrinking. The country's 115 billion barrels in proven reserves, most of it untapped, make it perhaps the last major oil territory yet to be spoken for. Engineers recently estimated that there may even be a further 150 billion barrels underground that have not yet been surveyed, much of it in the vast Western Desert. If true, Iraq could one day potentially match Saudi Arabia, whose output of 9.6 million barrels a day makes it the world's largest producer. Iraq currently...
...Deira opened in 2000 during "optimistic times," says its manager, Samir Skaik. They were short-lived. Soon after, the intifadeh, or Palestinian uprising, started, and there has been fighting and mayhem ever since. The same ingenuity that Gazans show during these hard times - running their cars on used vegetable oil when gas is cut off or rebuilding houses out of mud bricks because Israel has yet to allow in construction materials after its last offensive - applies to running the Al Deira. "Of course we thought of shutting down. But we have loyalty to Gaza and to our employees," says Skaik...
...Corrales says many Latin Presidents are feeling a similar sort of panic. Earlier this year, Chávez saw plummeting oil prices threaten to undermine his socialist revolution, which has enfranchised Venezuela's poor but has also raised fears about authoritarian rule. Chávez rushed through a constitutional referendum last February that lets him run for re-election indefinitely. Fernández's midterm defeat, says Corrales, may have leaders like Chávez "asking if they should ease up on their ideological hard line or ramp it up to neutralize opponents before it's too late." In Honduras...