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Oil Embargo By The Organization Of Petroleum Exporting Companies Essay

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Oil embargo in 1973 by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Companies (OPEC) focuses attention on the energy crisis and results in increased demand for coal as a preferred alternative to oil in the United States Europe, and much of the rest of the world [Speight 2013]. At that time there were a large number of oil power plants in the world which had suddenly become very expensive to operate led to the introduction of larger coal-fired power plants [Jeffs 2010]. While Middle East countries which has the largest proven reserves of crude oil; fuel oil as well as crude oil are an available and economically feasible fuel in power and water desalination plants (Fig 1). For example, Saudi Arabia which has the largest known oil reserves in the world, consume annually more than 40 million tons of crude oil and heavy fuel oil [Husain and Ahmad 2015] in both sea water desalination and power plants. The produced ashes were collected using electrostatic precipitators installed in the major facilities and dispose into landfills. While Egypt consume annually approximately 7 million tons of heavy fuel oil in electric power plants to generate electricity, generation more than 4000 metric tons of oil ashes [Mohammed et al 2016]. All the Egyptian power plants are not fitted with electrostatic precipitators and situated in the densely populated region. In addition, most of the ashes are not used for anything but landfill. However, little attention has been paid to the environmental effect

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