Petroleum

Hardwood dried for six months to a year is recommended as the cleanest-burning fuel for fireplaces. Yet faux logs made with petroleum-based wax have been popular for decades. This season, you'll be able to pile manufactured logs in the cart with a clearer conscience: Duraflame is going greener. Duraflame abandoned all use of increasingly expensive petroleum-based waxes this year. The company sells 100 million logs a year, and its new ones are all made with renewable vegetable-based waxes.

Columbia radioactive waste-treatment company GTS Duratek Inc. said yesterday that it has hired First Security Van Kasper, a San Francisco investment banking firm, to help determine whether it should sell its petroleum-products subsidiary.GTS Duratek currently owns 80 percent of that subsidiary, DuraTherm Inc. of San Leon, Texas. DuraTherm specializes in processing petroleum sludge. Any oil squeezed out of the sludge is recycled, and what remains is sent to landfills.DuraTherm took in $10 million in revenue last year.

JACOB BLAUSTEIN started a vast oil marketing empire with a horse and a wagon.In 1910, 18-year-old Jacob and his father, Louis, formed the impressive-sounding American Oil Co. and sold kerosene in Baltimore from a horse-drawn tank wagon.American Oil -- now part of the petroleum colossus BP Amoco, formed in 1998 when British Petroleum acquired Amoco -- first operated out of a livery stable on Clark- son and Wells streets. The family horse, Prince, pulled a wagon with a large metal tank.Louis, who fled Lithuania in 1888, sold petroleum products for John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey for 18 years.

Crown Central Petroleum Corp. said yesterday it has hired an investment bank to devise ways to reward its long-suffering shareholders -- with the sale of all or part of the Baltimore oil company as one possibility.The disclosure was included in the company's fourth-quarter and year-end earnings report that marked the seventh time in eight years that it has finished in the red.Crown's rocky financial performance has jolted its stock, sending its Class B shares from nearly $37 in 1989 to $7 yesterday, despite the most powerful bull market in history.

Amoco Corp., which became part of the largest oil acquisition yesterday, has its roots in Baltimore, where petroleum pioneer and Baltimorean Louis Blaustein established American Oil Co. in 1910 and laid the foundation for an industry.More than 88 years later, British Petroleum Co. said yesterday that it will buy Amoco for $53 billion in stock and assumed debt in a deal that would create an oil colossus with $108 billion in annual revenue.The takeover would be the largest of a U.S. company by a company overseas, eclipsing the buyout of Chrysler Corp.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. drivers are consuming record quantities of gasoline so far this year, with about half refined from imported oil.The nation's dependency on imported oil is also setting records as domestic production of oil slowly declines.The prospect, oil industry experts say, is for all these trends to continue robustly, at least as long as the economy remains strong. But the heavy demand means that any sharp increase in gasoline prices would have a even bigger effect on the U.S. economy.

WASHINGTON -- Breaking with other oil industry leaders, a senior British Petroleum executive has acknowledged that scientists have reached a consensus about global warming and that to ignore concerns over climate change "would be unwise and potentially dangerous."John Browne, group chief executive of the British oil company, said that in tackling the controversial issue of global warming, about which the oil industry has long expressed skepticism, it is time "for change and for a rethinking of corporate responsibility."

WORRIED THAT the six-year bull run carried stock prices too high? Maybe you should relax and adopt an investment approach that one of its practitioners calls "pretty sleepy."It's buying shares priced low in relation to their book value, or net worth or liquidation value, if you prefer. Disciples say the strategy will let investors profit if prices keep rising -- but offers the prospect of owning stocks that will fall less than the rest if the market tanks. Meantime, these "cheap" stocks often are takeover targets.

Union National Bank has named three more community leaders to sit on the board of its new Eldersburg branch.Dann Finch of Westminster is the manager of sales, service, parts and rental at Finch services in Eldersburg. Michelle Fleming of Eldersburg is secretary/treasurer for Fleming Petroleum Service Inc. Brian Haight of Finksburg is a partner in the family owned and operated Haight Funeral Home in Sykesville.Pub Date: 8/18/96

Southern States Cooperative Inc. plans to ask the Mount Airy planning commission tonight for permission to build a bulk fuel storage site on industrial land on East Ridgeville Boulevard.The proposed storage area for 200,000 gallons of petroleum and 30,000 gallons of propane is allowed as a special exception under the town's zoning law.Southern States has an option for a 38.9-acre site.Preliminary plans to create industrial lots on the property are on the planning commission's agenda for tonight.

No energy policy proposal has caused more acrimony or political gridlock preventing major progress toward energy security than domestic oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf. Liberals and environmentalists who oppose tapping into America's oil reserves in Alaska and offshore invoke the need to protect America's pristine lands and coasts. Republicans - led by Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin - see nature conservation as a lower priority in the face of high gasoline prices and dangerous dependence on oil coming from some of the world's worst regimes.

Would the gentleman with the property on Joppa Road near the Baltimore Beltway please get back in touch? You called a couple of weeks ago - something about turning your sprawling property back into farmland - and I know people who would be interested in talking to you. You might be, literally, on the edge of an important new trend. It's called "urban edge agriculture," and some in farming believe it's the next big thing. (Note: These are not the same people who predicted that emu ranching would be the next big thing.

Hardwood dried for six months to a year is recommended as the cleanest-burning fuel for fireplaces. Yet faux logs made with petroleum-based wax have been popular for decades. This season, you'll be able to pile manufactured logs in the cart with a clearer conscience: Duraflame is going greener. Duraflame abandoned all use of increasingly expensive petroleum-based waxes this year. The company sells 100 million logs a year, and its new ones are all made with renewable vegetable-based waxes.

ATLANTA -- The mythology of the Old West is replete with tales of dry land and drought, of parched landscapes and prayers for rain. Hollywood has told many a story of rainmakers - men, and occasionally women, who wandered the prairie with promises of a magic that could cause the heavens to open up and pour water down upon the earth. Suddenly, the desperation that drove such claims doesn't seem so far-fetched in the Southeastern United States, where severe drought is drying up wells and emptying reservoirs.

Louis Rice Witt Jr., a retired petroleum equipment executive and decorated World War II veteran, died of congestive heart failure Sunday at Union Memorial Hospital. The Catonsville resident was 84. Born in Niagara Falls, N.Y., he attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and earned a degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He joined the Army and landed at Marseille, France, in October 1944. He served in an infantry unit that was trucked to the front near Baccarat in the Lorraine province.

Microfiber is weaving its way through our lives. It's in the chamois that dries your car and the bath towel that dries your body. It's in dress shirts, underwear, surf shorts, hiking boots, raincoats, sofas, hospital mops and surgical masks. In October, the ubiquitous fiber crossed a new frontier: The National Basketball Association announced that it would replace the traditional leather that covers the league's basketballs - a change that outraged purists. So what is this stuff? And why the hoopla?

The sudden loss of 8 percent of America's domestic crude oil supply and nearly 3 percent of the nation's supply overall will almost certainly cramp the driving style and pinch the wallets of Marylanders. But consider the impact on Alaska, where the state treasury is expected to lose between $5 million and $6 million in revenue sharing for every day some thousand BP oil wells in Prudhoe Bay remain shut down for repair and inspection of pipelines. Drivers in the Lower 48 may get some relief if President Bush decides to open the Strategic Petroleum Reserves - though that emergency Gulf Coast stash may be too far away from the Western states typically served by BP's closed fields on the Northern Slope.

Each morning as Jeff Dolch drives down Ritchie Highway to get from his home in Arnold to the BP Amoco gasoline station he owns at St. Paul Street and Mount Royal Avenue in Baltimore, he pays close attention to the gas prices along the way. If they are different than during his commute the night before, Dolch knows his first order of business is checking whether his own prices must change. Before he makes a cup of coffee, Dolch checks an Internet site to see how much his distributor is charging for gasoline that day. Owners like Dolch then decide how much to charge their customers based on that figure and other factors, such as their competitors' prices, when their next shipment of gas is due and how much it will cost them to buy it. Gasoline prices are determined by a sequence of events that starts at the futures markets, as men and women on the trading floor yell and wave slips of paper in their hands, and ends in customers' wallets.

ATLANTA -- President Bush is reportedly annoyed that the Chinese are using so much petroleum. With the world's fastest-growing economy, China's oil consumption has soared to at least 6.5 million barrels a day, and its market for automobiles is growing. If the boom continues, the Chinese may eventually be somewhere in the neighborhood of the United States, which burns up about 20 million barrels a day. Who do those Chinese think they are - Americans? If that sounds arrogant, well, it is. Indeed, it takes a lot of chutzpah to chide a country that consumes about a third of the petroleum the United States does.

Entrepreneurial training for farmers The Howard County Economic Development Authority will offer the NxLevel, five-week entrepreneurial training course for farmers, "Tilling the Soil of Opportunity." The course is geared to agricultural entrepreneurs who have started or are considering an agriculture-based venture not tied to large-scale, commodity-style production and are searching for innovative ideas and marketing opportunities. The program, which includes 10 topics, includes lectures, discussions, speakers, networking opportunities and instructor consultations.