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INDUSTRY-BY-INDUSTRY OUTLOOK : The Year in Preview

By CHRIS KRAUL
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California came several years late to the nation’s economic recovery party, but the state should be celebrating all through 1997.

Here is what key industries will be up to:

ENERGY: Oil and gasoline prices should decline as Iraqi crude makes its way to the world market in a U.N.-brokered oil-for-food deal. However, California’s gasoline prices remain vulnerable to short-term price spikes because refineries are operating at near capacity: Breakdowns, unscheduled maintenance and fires will cause prices to rise at the pump. Atlantic Richfield, Unocal and Chevron will continue to shift oil exploration resources to huge untapped reserves, booming markets and tricky politics of Asia and former Soviet Union countries and away from the environmental restrictions at home.

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Chris Kraul

Chris Kraul covered South America for the Los Angeles Times from his base in Bogota, Colombia. He joined the paper in 1987 and was business editor of the San Diego edition until it closed in 1992. He then began covering the border and Mexican economies until his assignment to The Times’ Mexico City bureau in 2001. He reopened the paper’s Bogota bureau in 2006. He has also covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is a graduate of the University of South Florida and also has been a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, San Diego Union-Tribune and the San Diego Business Journal.

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