TPT May 2007

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

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