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American Petroleum

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Submitted By jeff23blue
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According to the American Petroleum Institute, the industry is divided into sectors to cover all the procedures involved in finding, producing, processing, transporting and marketing oil and gas. These sectors include:
1. Upstream: involved in exploration and production of oil and gas using advanced geology to high-tech offshore drilling platforms
2. Downstream: involved in refining and marketing. It also includes the transportation of products using tankers from local terminals to service stations and ownership and operations in retail outlets.
3. Pipeline: involved in the movement of oil from ocean platforms and wells on land to refineries and finally to terminals where they are released to retail outlets
4. Marine: comprises all aspects of petroleum and its products movement by water, including port operations, maritime fighting and oil spill response.
5. Service and supply: includes companies that provide supplies, services, design and engineering support for exploration, drilling, refining and other operations.

As with all other industries, there exist features that are peculiar to the petroleum. Common amongst these as identified in the 2007 UNCTAD report are: t finite supply of the product as it is non-renewable t differences in cost between production sites as a result constraints in technology, environment, etc that may exist in one site and not in the other t the industry is capital intensive and as such the risk level is high t in terms of demand and supply, the industry is inelastic in the short-run t It is dominated by multinational firms that engage in intra-firm trade and transfer pricing t formation of cartels and other forms of price collusion is a common feature t due to high capital cost, there are barriers to entry for new firms as they may not be able to meet up with the cutting-edge technology employed by the multinationals.
t

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