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ay
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une
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transaction
“shows corporate Russia is at its healthiest yet”
.
Emerging economies now account for 6 of the 10 biggest
steelmaking nations. China alone makes almost a third of the
world’s steel. Mittal Steel Co, the world’s largest producer,
started with an Indonesian steel plant. Arcelor SA proposed
merging with OAO Severstal, Evraz’s Russian rival, before
agreeing to be bought by Mittal in the industry’s biggest-
ever combination. In this broader context, New York-based
Bloomberg saw in the Evraz takeover of Oregon Steel another
indication of the
“emerging muscle”
of steel makers from
outside the developed countries.
Elsewhere in steel . . .
›
Arcelor Mittal, the European steel producer, has been ordered
by US antitrust regulators to sell a tinplate mill in Maryland
instead of one in West Virginia. The Justice Department said Mittal
must sell the Sparrows Point mill, near Baltimore, because that
business can stand alone as a producer. The company’s plant in
Weirton, West Virginia, would need to find a new supply of the steel
slabs used to make tinplate, hence the exemption. Mittal, which is
based in Rotterdam, had planned to sell the Weirton mill to satisfy
US antitrust concerns after its $38.3 billion acquisition of Arcelor, of
Luxembourg, last year.
Oil and gas
Chevron chief calls for a US energy policy
Chevron Corp (San Ramon, California) is the second-largest
American oil company, engaged in every aspect of the global oil
and gas industry. The successor to Standard Oil of California, it
earned $17 billion in 2006. But oil is becoming harder to find and
more expensive to produce. David J O’Reilly, Chevron’s chairman
and chief executive, spoke recently with Jad Mouwad of the New
York Times about the challenges facing big American oil and gas
companies, deploring the lack of a national energy policy. Following
are excerpts from the interview. (‘Big profits, big worries in oil fields,’
March 3).
Mouwad
:
Is there enough oil out there to meet the world’s growing
demand for energy?
O’Reilly
: I think yes, certainly in the foreseeable future. But it is
not in easy-to-get-to places or easy-to-recover places. Technology
allows us to go farther and find oil in places we never thought we
could. It’s not so much the molecules, it’s the access, either through
technology or through the permission.
In the US, one of the issues is offshore access. The Europeans
have a much more progressive attitude toward this. The Norwegians
produce oil offshore, the British do, the Dutch do, the Danish do.
They all produce oil offshore. And yet we in the US don’t seem to
be able to come to terms with doing this effectively. There are many
areas of our offshore that have not yet been explored.
Q
:
How do you break into the debate on energy policy in the United
States? It seems so entrenched.
A
: We don’t have an energy policy. We have discussions about
different people’s views and their answers. One of the things