And that's not all. One of the biggest industrial projects in Kuwait today is the building of two new gathering stations. These are industrial hubs where many pipelines from an oilfield all come together, so the crude can be separated from gas and water before being pumped out to tankers. The two new Kuwaiti gathering stations are being built by China's state-owned petroleum company, working under the design and direction of the American company Parsons Engineers. They work through Chinese-English interpreters.
China has a great potential both as a consuming market and a place to refine oil.
Their farms are already one of the biggest customers of our fertilizers. While China, Japan and their neighbors are all becoming more dependent on gulf oil, America has been steadily shifting its dependence to the Atlantic basin. America gets only about 19 percent of its oil now from the Persian Gulf. Last year, Venezuela overtook Saudi Arabia and Mexico as the biggest oil supplier to the U.S. market. This shift to Venezuela was due in part to the fact that Saudi Arabia nationalized its oil business in the 1970's, while the Venezuelans have been inviting in U.S. oil companies and giving them coveted production-sharing agreements, which is where the oil companies really make big money.