Gordon Campbell Watkins was my friend for forty years. He freed me, as the Scots poet says, from many a blunder and foolish notion. We joined forces twenty years ago, when the basic data on hydrocarbon scarcity were starting to disappear. (Adelman and Watkins, 1996). A revised updated version...

The Mideast oil-producing nations are the heirs of the multinational oil companies whom they gradually expropriated, starting around 1950. They have inherited the companies' problem: repressing investment and production.

Private owners of world oil resources eventually failed to restrain abundance and keep an above-competitive price. The OPEC nations had far greater market power, but overestimated it. Short time horizons drove OPEC nations to raise the price too much. They retreated to a more tenable level. But...

`Oil Equivalence' is widely used to measure total hydrocarbon activity. Natural gas is converted to oil using a fixed factor, usually based on thermal measurement. In turn, expenditures on oil and gas are divided by such `oil equivalence' volumes to define unit costs, especially of reserve...