Word: opec
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...immediate focus is Bali, Indonesia, where the jet-about oil ministers of the 13-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are gathering this week. The occasion will be OPEC's 59th ministerial meeting since the cartel was founded in 1960. Looming over all other discussions: whether to push up the cost of oil beyond the $30 Saudi benchmark price and the $37 per bbl. ceiling price set in June...
Seven lean years have passed since OPEC, in a few short weeks of 1973 and 1974, began radically manipulating worldwide petroleum prices by increasing the cost of a barrel of crude from $2.41 to $10.95. Since then, oil-consuming countries have paid the oil producers a staggering $370 billion for the precious black product that is essential to industrial survival. Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani warns that oil could easily rise to as much as $60 per bbl. in the foreseeable future...
Until recently, bulging worldwide inventories in the oil-importing nations acted as a brake on rising prices. But the war between Iran and Iraq, which has cut total OPEC production by about 3.5 million bbl. per day, has created pressure for higher prices. Repeated bombings and shellings have reduced to rubble the refineries and export facilities in the two countries, and experts believe that it would take up to a year after hostilities ended before normal export levels could be resumed...
...Though OPEC seems invariably to profit from the suffering of its customers, the organization has hardly engineered the crisis from which it is benefiting. Instead, the group has merely been a catalyst, if a particularly jarring one, for economic changes that were bound to come. Petroleum prices have been going up because worldwide demand for oil has been increasing relentlessly while supplies have fallen. The cartel's policies have been designed to exploit the opportunity and earn a higher profit from petroleum sales...
With oil costs soaring, the hunt for alternatives to OPEC petroleum has become a global obsession. To bolster conventional sources of crude, oilmen are drilling more and deeper than ever before. Often they are going to depths of 15,000 ft. or more, and frequently in storm-tossed seas that not even a seasoned mariner would care to navigate. A record 60,000 new oil and natural gas wells are expected to be dug in the U.S. this year, as compared with 27,602 in 1973. Meanwhile, engineers are racing to find new and more effective methods to recover...