Oil-addicted America finds a temporary fix in Africa
Source: The Seattle Times
Excerpts:
Fifty-eighty percent of all petroleum burned in the United States comes from abroad, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says in its 2005 annual report. That stark dependency on outsiders, analysts say, will grow even if the last pockets of oil in America are drilled.
Oil and anger in Nigeria
Back in Nigeria, Felicia, Beatrice and Comfort were running through their village of Itak Abasi. They clutched packets of rehydration salts.
The medicine was free, distributed by health officials. The village wells were tainted with fecal matter. And people were dying of acute gastric infections, possibly cholera. Two children had succumbed that day. Another two would die the next week. The doctors were angry.
Itak Abasi — "Foundation of God" in the local Ibibio language — is a rural slum festering atop a sandbar at the mouth of the Akwa Ibom River. Its hovels squat half a mile from the Exxon Mobil oil-export terminal that supplied the bulk of African crude purchased by Marathon and sold in South Elgin. Since 1971, the facility has funneled billions of dollars' worth of petroleum to the United States. Itak Abasi seethes next door with neither plumbing nor electricity.
"The oil companies are no good," said villager Sunday Jeremiah, 40. "We are crying daily."
He is a fisherman. And the young girls — ages 10, 11 and 13 — are three of his seven children. Exxon Mobil's local subsidiary, Mobile Producing Nigeria, pumps the local oil fields in a joint venture with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. The U.S. oil giant has a complex relationship with its destitute neighbors. It helped renovate the village's schoolhouse, but it also spilled at least 40,000 barrels of crude into the sea in 1998. Fishermen say the spill permanently destroyed the village's traditional livelihood.
The Texas-based giant is both courted and reviled by the Ibibio people. The Nigerian central government for the most part is invisible. Asked why villagers didn't dig latrines — a simple way to blunt fatal gastrointestinal epidemics — Itak Abasi's old, bald-headed chief snapped, "That's the oil company's job!"
Seeking new sources
Few Americans realize it, but they have hitched their wagon — or rather their 210 million cars and trucks — to Africa's troubled star.
The planet's only remaining superpower is rattling its half-empty oilcan at the poorest continent in the world.
This state of affairs has come about because two-thirds of the world's oil is controlled by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and most of it is pooled in the Middle East. Chronic instability in that region — today stoked by the U.S. intervention in Iraq and Israel's battle with Hezbollah — has further encouraged the United States to hedge its oil bets elsewhere.
U.S. companies have trudged to Central Asia looking for low-quality oil. They are punching wells into the ecologically fragile shallows of the Caspian Sea. And they are investing billions in upgrading huge but risky oil fields in business-hostile Russia.
Nigeria, Africa's oil heavyweight with 36 billion barrels of reserves, boasts one-seventh of Saudi Arabia's bounty. Still, African crude has its advantages. It is light and low in sulfur — well-suited to pollutant-sensitive U.S. refineries. Its reservoirs are closer.
Americans already get more oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia. By 2015, oil experts say, African states will supply one-quarter of U.S. imports, up from 15 percent today. The United States quietly signaled this shift in 2002, when the State Department declared African oil a "strategic national interest," meaning in diplomatic code that U.S. troops may intervene to protect it.
"I think the U.S. military would find our swamps worse than Iraq," snorted Austin Onuoha, a Nigerian human-rights activist who specializes in oil issues. "But at least they might build some infrastructure after they invade. Americans always do this, right?"
Onuoha's sarcasm was well-earned. He was talking from his blacked-out house in the oil-rich Niger Delta. The electricity in Africa's petro-giant had winked out again. And this fit sourly into his main thesis: Oil is rotting Africa's frail democracies.
According to the World Bank, 80 percent of Nigeria's $340 billion in oil revenue has been pocketed by 1 percent of the population — a cast of thugs who include the world's most venal politicians and generals. In short, geysers of easy petrodollars corrupt weak African institutions. They unleash reckless government spending. And they usually stoke internecine fighting.
Port Harcourt, the decaying commercial center of the Niger Delta, should be the booming capital of a tropical oil kingdom that spouts as much crude as three Alaskas. Instead, it's a handmade slum. Foreign oil workers zip around in curtained minivans, hoping to avert kidnapping by criminal gangs and ethnic militias. The hotels are guarded by men sporting aviator sunglasses and Kalashnikovs.
Rounding out the picture is world-class pollution (at least 4,800 oil spills over 20 years), "bunkerers" (oil thieves who drill into pipelines, often incinerating themselves and hundreds of others), and brutish military tactics (Nigerian troops torching thatched villages and strafing oil smugglers' barges with helicopter gunships). Nobody knows the death toll in the delta.
The tightest crude market in 30 years is turning Nigeria's obscure swamp skirmishes into a global energy flash point. Nigerian insurgents announce their next attack on a Shell platform — and crude futures quiver in Tokyo and New York. Oil first hit the $50-a-barrel mark in 2005 when an SUV-driving warlord named Mujahid Dokubo-Asari threatened "all-out war" in the delta.
"We know the world covets Nigerian oil more than ever," said Onengiya Erekosima, a Bible-quoting spokesman for the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force, one of many militias in the lawless squalor of Nigeria's oil patch.
About one-quarter of Nigeria's 2.3 million-barrel-a-day crude flow is regularly choked off by the likes of Erekosima.
"We will force the international community to respond to our suffering," he said, "because we can cut off their crude at any time."
Exxon Mobil says it paid coastal communities millions of dollars in restitution after the huge 1998 spill. Company spokeswoman Susan Reeves said Exxon Mobil's subsidiary, in cooperation with the Nigerian national oil company, also spends $10 million to $12 million a year on community development, most of it on education, health, roads, micro-enterprises and agricultural assistance. Little of such money is evident in Itak Abasi, however.
