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Many A decade ago, at a time when plaices like Ivory Coast and Equatorial Guinea were being largely ignored by the petroleum world majors in favor of proven mega-sources like Nigeria and Angola--and when their drilling sites could thus be leased for a relative song--Joe Bruso helped put these states back on the map. Bruso was part of a small team working for United Meridian Corp. (later acquired by Ocean Energy) that helped discover and develop the big Zafiro field off Equatorial Guinea. The impact for that country of half a million people, Bruso said in a phone interview from Houston, "has been extraordinary", it was not uninteresting for United Meridian either. Meantime, Ivory Coast, where Bruso and his partner, Coy H. Squyres, discovered the Panthere gas condensate and Lion oil fields, went within a few years from being a net energy importer to a net exporter, and from being an overlooked bit of West African real estate to a place where "you just can't get acreage" for drilling.
Those findings, facilitated by the use of exploration data left behind by the majors, were made on a $1 million annual budget over just four years. The huge returns on a relatively small layout sparked a kind of offshore land rush.
While the impact of such finds has been uneven--some of West Africa's poor say they have seen little of the new wealth oil and gas are expected to flow for years in ways that are making this one of the World's more significant producer regions. Hundreds of sites remain to be explored. "It's amazing the leap to prosperity that the whole place has made," Bruso said of Equatorial Guinea. He is now president of Sovereign Oil Gas, a small Houston-based firm.
American boosters say African oil can help lessen U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Indeed, a group representing the industry and its backers in Congress and government have called for the Gulf of Guinea to be declared of vital strategic interest. Its waters border Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria. West Africa, led by Nigeria and then Angola and Gabon, now supplies the United States with roughly 15 percent of its oil, but that figure is expected to reach 25 percent over the next decade. West African crude oil tends to be of good quality, selling just below the Brent benchmark. It can reach refineries in the Gulf of Mexico in just 20 days, half the time required from the Middle East, at savings of 35 cents per barrel, according to Petroleum Intelligence Weekly.
Representative William Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, has called for a "full-fledged makeover of the U.S. strategic relationship with Africa to take advantage of its petroleum potential. "The United States stands to benefit by having a stable, abundant and relatively inexpensive source of high-quality oil; Africa benefits in that it will receive billions of dollars in badly needed investment and government revenue," he said. "It is a classic win-win situation." West African oil production is now about 3.5 million barrels per day, said Michael Rodgers, senior director of upstream services at PFC Energy in Washington.
West African reserves are forecast to reach 40 billion barrels by 2010, according to Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. All this, Rodgers said, is not going to lead to a new Middle East-size source of oil for the West. His own estimate of total African reserves of 80 billion barrels is a fraction of the 650 billion to 700 billion barrels in the Middle East. Still, he said, it will diminish "the importance of the Middle East".
For Bruso, the development of West African oil is far from complete. A spate of "billion-barrel discoveries" in Nigeria and Angola are yet to be developed, he said, adding that there are seven big sites in development, each likely to produce around 250 million barrels a day. "That's a huge new volume that will be hitting the market starting between 2004 and 2007," h
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"Terrestrial mining" (L3, Para.6) can best be replaced by"______".
Now, Nautilus is using the ROV to ______.
Section B
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.
On August 18th US News & World Report released its 2007 rankings of America's top colleges. The survey began in 1983 as an unofficial opinion poll, when the magazine asked 662 college presidents to identify the country's best places of learning. It has since changed into an annually frightening experience for reputable universities. A strong showing in the rankings spurs student interest and alumni giving while a slip has grave consequences for public relations.
University administrators deeply dislike the survey. Many reject the idea that schools can be stacked up against one another in any meaningful way. And the survey's methodology is suspect. The rankings are still based partly on peer evaluations. They compare rates of alumni giving, which has little to do with the transmission of knowledge. Besides, the magazine's data are sup plied by the schools and unproved.
But whether the rankings are fair is beside the point, because they are wildly influential. In the 1983 survey barely half of the presidents approached bothered to respond. Today, only a handful dare refuse.
Most, in fact, do more than simply fill out the survey. Competition between colleges for top students is increasing, partly because of the very popularity of rankings. Colin Diver, the president of Reed College in Oregon, considers that "rankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behaviour." A school may game the system by luring applications from students who stand no chance of admission, or by leaning on alumni to arrange jobs for graduates. Reed is one of the few prominent colleges that dares to despise taking part in the US News survey.
In some ways, the scramble to attract applicants has helped students. Universities such as Duke in North Carolina and Rice in Houston are devoting more money to scholarships. That seems a reasonable response to the challenge of the rankings, as the National Centre for Education Statistics reckons that roughly two-thirds of undergraduates rely on financial aid.
Other colleges, though, are trying to drum up excitement by offering privileges that would have been unheard of a generation ago. Students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) now appreciate weekly maid service in the dorms. "The elevators", replied an enthusiastic respondent to an online survey, "smell lemon fresh." Students at Pennsylvania State University enjoy free access to Napster, the music-sharing service. Multi-million dollar gyms have become so common that they are unremarkable.
University officials, defending this strategy, often imply that they are only responding to student demand. Discouraging words for those who believe that a college's job is to educate, not indulge.
What do the top universities take the annual rankings as？
______ refers to the phenomenon that words of different meanings have the same form.
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