Dream Pipe

When foreign industrialists visit the U.S., their rubbernecking is focused on its skyscrapers, factories and freeways--and then on its continent-spanning pipelines.

Last week a band of oilmen said that they will build the biggest line of them all: a yard-wide pipe that, when it is completed late next year, will pump gasoline, kerosene, furnace oil and diesel fuel over 1,600 miles from Houston to New York's Staten Island and to 1,000 miles of spur lines in between. The $350 million pipe, biggest privately financed construction job in history, will be bankrolled by nine oil majors. They are: American Oil, Cities Service, Continental, Gulf, Phillips, Pure Oil, Sinclair, Socony Mobil and Texaco.

For oilmen, the line will reduce the higher costs of shipping by sea and will tap growing markets in cities that present pipelines skirt. It will also have more immediate effects on the U.S. economy. The builders will order 500,000 tons of steel (for about $100 million) and $100 million worth of pumps, generators and other finished gear.

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