Jan 18, 2016
Oil in the Middle East(Southwest Asia)
• Two of the most important natural resources found in Southwest Asia are natural gas and oil.
• These two resources bring wealth into the region because they are needed for much of the world’s economy.
• Over half of the world’s known oil reserves are found in the Middle East.
• Countries with access to oil often have much more money than countries without access to oil.
Oil and Natural Gas
• The Middle East became extremely important as well as increasingly wealthy, especially as they gradually took control of the oil production for foreign entities.
• Crude oil gets drilled up from the ground and is transported either to refineries or to tankers.
• The refineries refine the oil into other products, e.g. gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and others.
• The oil tankers transport the oil from SW Asia to other places, such as Texas City.
Supertankers!
• The largest supertanker in the world is the Knock Nevis
• It’s 1504 feet long, 226 feet wide, and sits 80 feet in the water when fully loaded. It weighs 1,428,496,250 pounds and can carry 127,100,000 gallons of oil (4 million barrels a day)
• She’s so big, she can’t navigate the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, or even the English Channel.
• The big worry with tankers is oil spills, such as the Exxon Valdez back in 1989.
• The US uses 18.8 million barrels per day, according to the EIA.
Top 5 CountriesU.S : 18.8 MBDChina: 8.3 Japan: 4.4 India: 3.1 Russia: 2.7
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries - OPEC
• In the 1960’s, several Southwest Asian countries joined with other oil-rich countries around the world to create the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in order to have more control over the price of oil on the world market.
• Countries belonging to OPEC control the daily production of oil which in turn controls the price of oil on the world market.