Abstract
IN an article in Volume 31, No. 1, of The Lamp (house journal of the Standard Oil Co., New Jersey, published fire times a year primarily for employees and stock holders) a survey is made of progress in oil production during the past fifty years in the Middle East. During that time production increased systematically, until in 1948 it reached a total of one million gallons per day, and the area became recognized as the third most important producing centre of the world, the United States and the Caribbean being first and second respectively. The most significant oil region in the Middle East as yet discovered lies in a great geological trough which extends through Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the smaller sheikhdoms of Kuwait, Bahrein and Quatar. There is intense activity throughout the area, and the very great rise in production is a measure of the success of prolonged labour by oilmen in one of the hottest climates of the world. Nevertheless, Middle East oil could be made to flow faster by elimination of the present bottleneck in transportation. Ninety per cent of the oil is concentrated in the Persian Gulf area, which at the nearest point lies eight hundred miles east and southeast of the Mediterranean. Every barrel of oil travels by sea. The route will probably remain the same for destinations east of Suez ; but for the great markets of Western Europe, substitution of overland pipeline transport is geographically feasible. A combined land and sea route of four thousand one hundred miles to the English Channel ports compares impressively with the present all-sea route from the Persian Gulf, south-east round Arabia and northwards through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Pipelines when built will, it is estimated, eliminate more than three thousand one hundred miles of tanker haulage on shipments to Western Europe. A map showing proposed pipelines in the Middle East clearly indicates the extent of the project and at the same time demonstrates the present formidable wastage of tanker haulage. Given adequate overland transport facilities, this region can meet all Western European requirements. At the same time, the peoples of the Middle East will begin to feel the benefits attendant upon development of the first mass-volume export conwaiidity they have ever had.
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Middle East Oil. Nature 164, 1118 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/1641118a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1641118a0