Word: oilfields
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Listening Posts. The major compromises and concessions had been worked out before Kissinger left Washington: Israel is to give up the Abu Rudeis oilfield and the Giddi and Mitla passes in the Sinai; American technicians are to man listening posts between the two armies; the agreement is to run for three years and, while it will not include an Egyptian statement of nonbelligerency, it will amount to about that...
Near Los Angeles, a 20-sq.-mi. depression has formed around the Wilmington oilfield after 35 years of exploitation. At the center of the great bowl lies the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, where a 29-ft. decline in the land level has forced the Navy, oil companies and others to build flood-control dikes. Besides twisting railroad tracks, crushing oil-well casings and undermining buildings, the slumping of the ground has also triggered small earthquakes. To jack up the sunken terrain, the city of Long Beach has been forcing water back into the ground...
Odessa and Midland sat on the prairie like towns in which the clocks had stopped. Oilmen capped marginal wells, sold their drilling equipment abroad or simply abandoned it in the fields; oilfield hands moved on to Canada or Alaska, or took other jobs. But then, in September 1973, Congress allowed "new" oil-produced above a 1972 base level -to float up to the world price, now about $11 per bbl. Suddenly, the producers, promoters, roughnecks and fortune hunters flocked back in droves to the oldtime West Texas boomtowns -and they are still coming...
Some Snags. Employers are paying handsomely for help. In the past six months, the wages of general oilfield workers have moved up from $6 to $6.44 an hour, first-class machinists who got $3.50 last summer are getting $5.65 an hour, while stenographers have jumped from $400 to $705 a month. Lynda Armstrong, 31, abandoned her ambition to be a nightclub singer to earn $1,000 a month as an oil-patch roustabout. "I'm no women's libber," she says. "I just want to do it if I can and let them...
...roughnecks and roustabouts," points out Michel Halbouty, an independent producer. "This is sophisticated machinery, and it needs trained people to operate it." Even so, West Texas oil companies are now paying as much as $1,200 a month for unskilled labor. Some producers want Government help in training new oilfield workers, plus federal intervention in the steel industry to increase production of pipe and other scarce hardware...