GIANT PIPE LINE

Wanganui Chronicle, 27 January 1948, Page 6

GIANT PIPE LINE

TRANS-ARABLA TO THE MEDITERRANEAN

No project in the world will make available so much oil for so little steel as the proposed Trans-Arabian pipe line (known as TAP line) which will move huge quantities of Arabian oil to the Mediterranean. Addressing the transportation committee of the American Petroleum Institute at Chicago recently, Mr. B. E. Hull, president of Trans-Arabian Pipeline Co. and former general manager of War Emergency Pipe Lines Inc., who built the huge American wartime pipelines known as Big Inch” and "Little Big Inch,’’ stated that "a ton of steel in the Middle East will actually bring to world markets 10 to 20 times more oil than a ton of steel anywhere else in the world,” according to advice received here by Caltex Oil (N.Z.) Ltd. The United States alone, according to Mr. Hull, cannot continue to meet the steadily rising demand for oil in both hemispheres. Although crude oil is being produced in the United States today at the highest possible rate consistent with efficient operation, that country is already a net importer of crude oil and has been faced with shortages of fuel for household heating during the present American winter. The large oil companies investing in the Middle East are convinced that TAP line will insure against a possible future shortage of oil in the western hemisphere. The Trans-Arabian line will cut 2600 miles off the journey from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and will carry oil at about one-third the cost of sea transport by tanker, said Mr. Hull. A shortage of tankers is already causing concern and the pipeline will use less than twothirds of the steel necessary to build 250 tankers, the number which would be required to move the same quantity of oil as the pipeline will carry in a given time. Three miles of pipe per day is being rolled at steelworks in Provo, Utah, for TAP line, concluded Mr. Hull.