和谐英语

Step by Step 3000 第3册 Unit10:Oil reserves and Parking places(1)

2016-11-01来源:和谐英语

Part 2. Oil reserves and Parking places.
A. Keywords.

Oil reserves, barrels, crude, oil field.
Vocabulary.

crude, tar sands, strip mining, toxic, strip, contaminate, voracious, offshore drilling, militant, soar, quench, recoverable, Alberta, Gulf of Mexico.
Listen to a news report on global oil reserve, complete the following chart.Let's begin in the Mid East which has about two thirds of the world's proven oil reserves.
Saudi Arabia's on the top with 266 billion barrels, Iraq and Iran are also rich in crude along with Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
But it might surprise you that Canada has a lot of oil too, some 178 billion barrels, much of it rests in the tar sands of Alberta.
It is a gigantic strip mining operation.
Environmentalists call it a disaster, leaving behind toxic chemicals, stripping forests and contaminating the water supply.
Now let's go south to Venezuela and parts of Mexico. Much of their oil, like Canada's, feeds the voracious appetite for crude in the United States, which's the world's biggest consumer of oil.
Yet did you know that US has some 21 billion barrels in reserve? So why doesn't it produce more?
Well, the US government bans most off shore drilling except in the Gulf of Mexico for environmental reasons.
So what does Russia fit in all of this? It's flush with cash from its oil reserves and it is the world's second largest producer.
Let's take a look at Africa now. Libya has the most oil reserves on the continent, about 39 billion barrels.
And further south, Nigeria has lots of crude but lots of problems too.
Militants routinely attack oil installations and kidnap workers, disrupting production and making lower prices soar.
All that's said, Who's going to quench the global thirst for oil in the future?
Well, it could be that Brazil becomes the newest major exporter with its discovery of a huge offshore oil field.
The oil is at great depth, some 4 miles below the ocean surface, but experts say it is recoverable.
And that may be the future of oil, going to great extremes to get it out of the ground.
Analysts estimate that there's another trillion barrels of oil yet to be discovered, but they say it would be found in remote places like the Arctic Ocean.
So it's going to cost a lot of money to get it if from the ground into your fuel tank.