With the Chinese also becoming major players in Africa's most productive oilfields, the United States is becoming a secondary player in the region that CIA analysts and others have said will be producing a quarter of our oil supply by 2025.
That's an alarming development so far as I'm concerned. American officials need to examine more thoroughly some of the presumptions that have prevailed for a decade there but are now out of date.
Around the time of his Senate confirmation hearings as CIA chief, Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) warned that Nigeria could well fall apart due to internecine wars between Muslims and Christians, North and South, the amply-resourced and the less so, not to mention historic ethnic, tribal and linguistic fractures. The prediction - which suggested the strong possibility of a breakup by 2010 - went largely unnoticed in the parochial living rooms of the United States but was widely discussed in Nigeria's lively and volatile press.
We now wonder whether this advice might not have been better delivered in secret, because I think it created a strong resentment in Nigeria's leadership and probably strengthened a predisposition to believe that Americans are out to get them. The strong momentum in Nigerian affairs is away from multinational domination of their oilfields, and companies with strong American roots or business ties like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell have suffered most in the changing marketplace.
Now we face another strong, aggressive and capable international competitor in the Russian entry; India is already well-represented, and while our alliance with them is sound it is always subject to change with the advent of nationalist Hindu governments and always subject to pressure from India's own aggressive moves to meet its future oil needs.
American companiess, on the other hand, seem to be playing like prima donnas who lose a match and walk off the court, leaving their nation's influence, prestige - and most importantly, its future oil supply - in other hands. There are new realities to accommodate and they have hurt the commercial pride of firms such as ExxonMobil, Devon Energy, Anadarko Petroleum and Noble Energy, who are not used to fighting so hard for - and sometimes losing - their unfair share of any given pie.
The reality is that these companies can no longer be viewed as "American" institutions in the first place because they have spread their tentacles so far and wide that if the American suckers on those tentacles were chopped off, the remaining suckers would fully sustain them. They will not protect our nation''s future oil supply simply because it is good for America; they will look at what is good for them to make such decisions, and then they will do their best to bend the government to their will, if it is not indeed already completely bent by the two oilmen in the White House.
Who then, will look out for our national interests, and aggressively promote them in Nigeria? That is a burning question that no one is bothering to quench.
Here is the article from Rancho:
Russia Strikes Deal to Explore for Oil in Nigeria
Created: 01.11.2005 16:44 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 16:53 MSK, 1 hour 28 minutes ago
MosNews
Russia’s state-owned oil firm Zarubezhneft recently struck Russia’s first oil deal with OPEC-member Nigeria to explore two offshore blocks in the Gulf of Guinea, the country’s Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said on Tuesday, Nov. 1.
Russian oil majors are expanding abroad from Iran and Saudi Arabia to Venezuela and Colombia as record revenues from high oil prices allow them to invest in reserves outside Russia. “We want to help encourage cooperation between Russian firms and countries in equatorial Africa, especially with the regional leader Nigeria,” the ministry quoted Russia’s No. 2 oil official Sergei Oganesyan as saying in a statement.
The statement, quoted by the Reuters agency, said an intergovernmental commission had been set up in 2004 and its first concrete result was the signing this year of the first oil deal between Nigeria and Zarubezhneft to explore and develop two offshore blocks. It did not specify the names of the blocks or other terms. A Zarubezhneft official said the company was talking with Nigerian authorities, but declined further comments.
Nigeria’s oil sector is dominated by major multinational companies.
Mid-sized Zarubezhneft has most of its operations offshore Vietnam where it produces around 230,000 barrels per day together with its partner, Vietnam’s state oil firm Petrovietnam. But as the joint venture’s fields are maturing fast, output is set to decline sharply in the next decade and Zarubezhneft is being forced to look for new assets around the world.
Zarubezhneft, or “Foreign Oil company”, was the single most active oil contractor in the oil-for-food program with Iraq, according to a highly critical report published last week by the U.N.-established Independent Inquiry Committee. The report by the Committee led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said Zarubezhneft had paid $8.7 million in illegal surcharges for Iraqi oil, which undermined U.N. attempts to deprive Saddam Hussein’s regime hard currency. The company hit back, calling the Volcker investigation “a malevolent spasm of the Cold War era.” It said the report contained many errors and no proof of wrongdoing by the company.
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