In the past, the general public has always seen the companies that make up Big Oil as kind of an interchangeable, amorphous blob of evil.
The hostile climate would make cleaning up a big oil spill hugely challenging, environmentalists say.
In a country where oil revenues make up a good 85% of government income and where energy-industry reforms have repeatedly stalled, the choice of oil minister will also be crucial.
Numerous U.S. officials have traveled recently to Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, to discuss the country's ability to increase exports enough to make up for the loss of Iranian oil under the sanctions, the official said.
Sudan said it confiscated the oil to make up for unpaid fees.
Iraq sits atop the world's fourth largest reserves of conventional crude, or about 143 billion barrels, and oil revenues make up 95 percent of the state budget.
Europe has a price on carbon, via cap and trade, but it burned more coal last year because its price on carbon is so low in the wake of the recession and because it needed coal to make up for the disruption of oil exports from Libya.
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Over recent months, the yen's weakening by about 20 percent against the U.S. dollar has helped export manufacturers but also boosted the cost of purchases of LNG and crude oil to make up for electricity shortfalls as all but two of Japan's nuclear power plants are operating following the March 2011 Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant disaster.
He says he wants the private sector to make up 70% of non-oil-and-gas GDP by 2020.
Up to a point, lavish capital outlays like these can make up for a shortage of old-fashioned oil wells.
Big Oil is finding that to make up for declining production from aging megafields they have to drill ever more holes into ever smaller reservoirs.
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's elaborate proposal to update the 30-year-old regulations that govern the fuel economy of U.S. pickups, minivans and SUVs released yesterday may or may not end up make the United States less thirsty for oil.
In some instances, a combination of public stocks and reduced obligation on industry is used, and it would be up to each country to decide how make additional oil available to the market.
The specific things that make oil companies successful are in how to prospect for, find, drill for, pump up, refine and sell oil.
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In the near term, as we transition to cleaner energy sources, we're going to have to make some tough decisions about opening up new offshore areas for oil and gas development.
For some months Saudi Arabia has been pumping oil at its fastest rate in 30 years to make up for Iranian crude lost to American and European sanctions, which officially started on July 1st.
The Saudis and Gulf allies may say that they intend to ramp up oil production, but not much of any increase will make it through to export markets.
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And within that fairly limited range, we think that the price of oil will move up and down many times, but not make a dramatic move, at least for very long, outside that range because of the balance of supply with demand.
Dubai is one of seven emirates to make up the United Arab Emirates, which is estimated to sit on 10 % of the world's known oil reserves.
Oil-soaked countries, he believes, will not open up their reserves for exploitation just to make life easier for companies like his.
For generations, the stability of global oil supplies has been guaranteed by Saudi Arabia's reserve capacity that could be relied on to make up for any shocks to those supplies due to political unrest or other factors.
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