Word: rig
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...entirely new skill, which could change this region as much as the wars in which he has fought have: drilling for oil. Since late November, he has toiled about 30 ft. aboveground on the first derrick erected in Kurdistan in decades, by a Norwegian outfit using a Chinese rig, of all things. From the top, there is a panoramic view of the hills around his tiny village of Tawke, where 30 families eke out a meager living herding sheep. It hardly looks like the location for a major economic boom. "We are poor," he says, sitting on his bunk during...
Gusher or not, the region is booming. On the border with Turkey, about a half-hour drive from the DNO rig, Kurdistan has clearly become Europe's gateway to Iraq. Trucks from Turkey, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany and the Netherlands are backed up for miles and carry goods from across the continent. Sea cargo from Dubai is diverted through Jordan, Syria and Turkey before reaching Kurdistan, where it is transferred to Iraqi trucks before proceeding to Baghdad. That route is the only choice: driving north through Iraq from the Persian Gulf is too dangerous...
...ultimately it's the price of oil that will determine Van Dyke's success. Thanks to intense demand for production, the cost of operating a drilling rig is now $400,000 a day; it was half that just a year ago. This year alone, Van Dyke drilled two dry holes off the coasts of Morocco and the Ivory Coast. Next year he'll try again in Morocco and in Ghana. He has just finished a $15 million 3-D seismic program in Madagascar, and he is planning his first well there, 6,000 ft. underwater. "You might spend $20 million...
...increasingly depend on land sales as their main source of revenue. But in order to sell village property, they need to control the townships. This means making sure that their allies are elected as village chiefs. And, as was the case in Taishi, it can also mean attempts to rig local elections. In China's countryside, new alliances of ?lites have emerged among township officials, companies, high-ranking cadres, village leaders and the hired fists they employ to do their dirty work, and whom farmers call "the black force." These alliances rule by controlling the ways laws are implemented...
Devastation that complete looks like an act of God, but residents here know that the truth is more complicated. For decades the oil-rig roughnecks and menhaden fishermen who have made their living on this fragile shore have seen drilling and dredging kill off the surrounding marshes and forests, leaving them defenseless against the rising waters. "Our parish was not only destroyed by nature," says Benny Rousselle, Plaquemines Parish president. "It was destroyed...