Semi-ot: No mention of jdz but interesting article
Oil-addicted America finds a temporary fix in Africa
By Paul Salopek
Chicago Tribune
KUNI TAKAHASHI / CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Felicia, left, Titi and Beatrice, daughters of fisherman Sunday Jeremiah, head for school in Itak Abasi, Nigeria. The village is closest to offshore fields supplying the South Elgin, Ill., Marathon station. Exxon Mobil helped renovate the village school, but the U.S. company is resented for not doing more for the impoverished area.
Related
Part 1 | Oil crisis: It's only just begun
Second of four parts
From last fall to early spring the crude oil flowing from offshore fields near the Akwa Ibom River tropical delta in Nigeria supplied the South Elgin, Ill., Marathon gas station 8,000 miles away with roughly one-quarter of its oil.
That was just part of the torrent of foreign-bought crude that prompted President Bush, one of the most oil-friendly presidents in history, to concede in his latest State of the Union speech that "America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world."
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.
"We know how important this issue is," said Laura Binning, 37, a regular customer at the South Elgin Marathon. "But it's so big. It's hard to get your head around it."
Binning pulled her black H2 Hummer into the station one afternoon when Qua Iboe crude from Nigeria made up about 26 percent of her $72 gas purchase. She was taking her son Parker, 8, to Little League. She estimated, sheepishly, that her vehicle gets 10 mpg.
"At first it's on your mind," Binning said. "But then you get so busy. I got screaming kids. My mom's got cancer. And I work as a real-estate marketer out of my house. So you forget."
Laura, her husband, Tim, and their three children live in a grand home on 2.7 acres in St. Charles, an upscale suburb adjoining more working-class South Elgin. Their swimming-pool heating bill in October topped $2,000.
She winced hearing herself describe the Hummer as "something that signals success to our clients." But as it happened, the Binnings were among the few gas-station customers to ponder America's energy future beyond tomorrow's uptick in gas prices. They grappled with buying an electric-gasoline hybrid vehicle as their next car. They fretted over the kind of world their three boys would inherit.
In the end, like most Americans, they were optimists. Their livelihood — selling property in suburbia — rests primarily on a dubious supposition: the continuing abundance of cheap crude.
"Are there problems coming? Maybe. But I prefer to think the glass is half-full," said Tim, 37. "When shortages jack up oil prices permanently, someone will have the incentive to invent another fuel. That's how the market works."
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.
The future of sprawl
Tim Binning's cellphone rang. It did this on average 60 to 70 times a day. He has a 4,000-minute-a-month account. This time it was Laura. A washing machine at one of the Binnings' rental units was on the fritz.
"Go ahead, buy the new one," he advised.
Tim was at work in his car, a Volkswagen Phaeton, a luxury sedan the couple decided to purchase instead of a hybrid.
A landscape utterly decoupled from Chicago's core slid past Tim's windshield in icy tableaux: Starbucks, horse pastures, big-box stores and old houses marooned amid strip malls. This suburban backdrop is where more than half of Americans now live.
Tim noted that U.S. houses are vastly more heat efficient today than 20 years ago, but added that all those energy savings are eroded by constantly ballooning dream houses: The number of homes larger than 2,400 square feet has doubled since 1987, even as U.S. families continue to shrink.
"Look at what people have now," he said. "Two cars is the norm. So is two or three color TVs. Who in the 1950s had that?"
James Howard Kunstler, a writer of some renown in urban-planning circles, is the Ghost of Christmas Future for people who subscribe to the theory that the era of oil is in decline. He paints a harsh vista of oil-deprived life ahead.
"America finds itself nearing the end of the cheap-oil age having invested its national wealth in a living arrangement — suburban sprawl — that has no future," Kunstler asserts in his 2005 book "The Long Emergency."
"Suburbia has a tragic destiny."
He envisions the car-dependent landscape of the suburbs decaying into "slums of the future." He sees doors of oversize, unheated tract homes flapping open forlornly to the chill Midwest winds. Big-box retailers that rely on trucks that get, at best, 8 mpg to deliver sneakers made in China simply will implode, he says.
In this bleak vision, only trains and barges will be efficient enough to move goods. And millions of Americans will return, painfully, to their agrarian roots. Huge amounts of manual labor will be needed for survival-level farming.
Many call such predictions hysterical. But a high-powered study released last year by the Department of Energy warns that even with a concerted national effort it could take decades to transition from oil to fuel alternatives, and that "without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented."
With crude prices soaring into orbit, powerful people are listening. Peak-oil theory, espoused by the likes of one of Bush's billionaire friends, Richard Rainwater, helped persuade the president to insert the "addicted to oil" phrase into the State of the Union speech, according to Washington insiders.
Back in his car, Tim called Laura to arrange a meeting at a mall eatery 12 miles away. Lunchtime congestion was thickening. He sat, just another commuter alone with his cellphone, in a long line of vehicles at a red light.
Americans consume about 2.3 billion gallons of gasoline each year simply idling in traffic. That equals the annual oil output of Equatorial Guinea, Africa's most promising new petro-state.
