翻譯：THE OPEC oil cartel is about to turn 40, and the mood in the run-up to the grand heads-of-state party in Venezuela in less than three weeks time is jubilant. Not quite two years ago,oil was $10 a barrel and the cartel was on the brink of collapse. Now the oil price is well above $30 a barrel, and it shows little sign of coming down.

翻譯：crude petroleum is not an equilibrium mixture, and on a geological time scale its composition is slowly changing. S.R.silverman found that heating at 121C for two weeks caused detectable changes, the low-molecular-weight components formed being isotopically lighter so far as the carbon was concerned, than the original.

翻譯：Nearly three-fifths of all known petroleum reserves on Earth is to be found in the territory of the various Arabic-speaking countries. Kuwait , for instance , which is a small nation at the head of the Persian Gulf , with an area only three-fourths that of Massachusetts and a population of about half a million , posseses about one-fifth of all the known petroleum reserves in the world.

翻譯：Gas lift is the method of artificial lift that uses an external source of high-pressure gas for supplementing formation gas to lift the well fluids. The primary consideration in the selection of availability and compression cost of gas.

翻譯：In addition to being useful as an exploration tool, subsurface maps are a necessary part of any reservoir engineering study; and petroleum engineers, as well as geologists, must be completely familiar with their construction and interpretation.