EQUIPO NIZKOR |
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23jul05
Africa looms larger on US oil map.
Africa's vast oilfields discovered in recent years have attracted much attention from countries around the world, including the world's top oil consumer, the United States, which is increasingly focusing on African oil to secure stable energy supply.
Oil hungry economy demands stable energy source
As the world's biggest oil consumer, the United States devours 20 million barrels of crude oil everyday, almost one third of the global consumption. Meanwhile, its oil consumption is very much import-dependent, with more than 60 percent from the Middle East.
However, after the September 11 attacks and the US-led war against terror, many experts and lobbyists have expressed concerns that instability and anti-Americanism in the Middle East could endanger oil supplies.
President George W. Bush has said he wants to pursue energy sources that are closer to home so the country is less dependent on supplies from "unstable" parts of the world.
The United States, which is stepping up oil exploration in the Gulf of Guinea basin off the coast of west Africa, has been striving to keep crude flowing into its oil-hungry economy.
"African oil should be treated as a priority for the US national security post 9-11. I think that the post 9-11 it's occurred to all of us that our traditional sources of oil are not as secure as we thought they were," US Congressman William Jefferson once told a meeting of the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG).
Africa now has the third largest oil reserve in the world, only after the Middle East and South America. According to the OPEC statistics, till the end of 2003, there were 93.55 billion-barrel finds of oil on the continent, accounting for about 10 percent of the world's total. Currently the continent has an output of 8 million barrels a day, nearly 11 percent of the global daily yield.
The US government is gradually making policy shift to search for new oil supply in Africa, a continent that in the past had counted for little in its global strategy. In the Bush administration's 2003 National Security Strategy report, cooperation with African oil producers has been underlined as the important approach to "strengthen the US national security."
The more hawkish advocates of the policy even want the US military to create a Gulf of Guinea Command - similar in scale to the Korea Command - and to build a naval base on the island country of Sao Tome and Principe to protect the oil supplies.
US oil companies are also pushing for government policies that improve access to crude supplies in Africa.
Dave O'Reilly, chief executive of No. 2 US oil company ChevronTexaco Corp, said that protecting US energy needs means recognizing issues not just in energy policy but also in foreign and trade policies.
Exploration into Africa rewards
Efforts are not only from the US government, oil executives and policy-makers are now both exploring into west Africa's vast oilfields to secure cheap oil, and the rewards are potentially great.
According to the US Department of Energy, by 2003, 15.3 percent of US oil comes from Africa and US-owned firms are investing 10 billion dollars a year there. And it was estimated that by 2015 west Africa will represent 25 percent of total US oil needs and by 2020 will be exporting to it some 770 million barrels of African oil a year.
Former US president Bill Clinton in May 2000 signed the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in order to integrate Africa into the global economy by boosting trade with the United States, the continent's largest single country market.
Oil represents the lion's share of what Africa sells to the United States - some 87 percent of exports - concentrating AGOA's influence into a handful of countries including Angola, Chad and Gabon and Nigeria, the continent's top oil producer and ranked 11th worldwide. Nigeria is already the fifth largest exporter of oil to the United States, and with 1.5 million barrels a day flowing into US ports. West Africa exceeds Saudi Arabia as a source of US imports.
The US companies' oil exploration in the Gulf of Guinea basin has covered an area of more than 200,000 square km, involving nearly 10 countries.
ChevronTexaco Corp is planning an investment of 20 billion US dollars in the next five years, to further improve its oil production capacity in Africa. The company's executive O'Reilly said improving security and the investment climate in west Africa, which supplies light sweet crude oil that is in high demand, should be a priority in the US foreign policy.
Another energy giant Exxon Mobil Corp, which is going to invest 50 billion US dollars in the area in the next 10 years, said it had begun offshore production at a major facility off Angola, which is counting on oil revenues to help its recovery from three decades of civil war.
Exxon Mobil said its local subsidiary had started production ofthe 3.5 billion dollar "Kizomba B" project to develop one billion barrels of oil lying more than 320 km off the coast of Angola.
Angola is fast becoming a world oil player as sub-Saharan Africa's second largest producer after Nigeria, with output expecting to hit 2 million barrels a day by the end of 2007.
Exxon Mobil and its foreign partners in Angola - Britain's BP,ENI of Italy and Norwegian firm Statoil - have announced 38 discoveries in Angola with the potential to yield up to 4.5 billion oil-equivalent barrels.
[Source: Xinhua News Agency, Nairobi, 23Jul05]
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