...at the Mercy of Unreasonable Countries?

menacing. They have robbed banks, killed oil executives, blown up an oil pipeline, a gas pipeline, a tanker loading terminal, even overrun an oil rig 40 miles at sea. On this New Year’s Day another group, calling itself the Niger Delta Vigilante, attacked two police stations, a hotel and a restaurant, leaving 10 dead including their own. Masked gangs, showing up suddenly in light plastic speedboats propelled by 75hp engines, invariably have the upper hand.

“We are not communists or even revolutionaries. We’re just extremely bitter men,” is how MEND’s leader described their motives to Sebastian Junger, writing in Vanity Fair. The oil and gas pipelines -- Shell has a web of 3,720 miles threaded through the “creeks” of the delta – are impossible to protect, even if the Nigerian army were as well-equipped as the bandits. As in the Middle East, here again is a case where a small band can in a single action cause an oil shock felt around the world.

Depending on the nature of an oil supply disruption – an overthrow of the Saudi monarchy by Islamic fundamentalists, for example -- a U.S. president could be forced to use the military, not least because our heavily-mechanized ground forces, naval ships, and aircraft all run on oil. Even when we were far less reliant on imports, Nixon contemplated sending airborne troops to seize the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi if the Arab embargo did not end. The U.S. “could not tolerate [being]…at the mercy of a small group of unreasonable countries”, he said.

For that matter, one could argue that we have already fought Oil War I. As “Winning the Oil Endgame”, a book from the Rocky Mountain Institute, puts it, “historians will long debate whether the United States would have sent half a million troops to liberate Kuwait in 1991 if Kuwait just grew broccoli and we needed it”. And some maintain that the unspoken agenda behind our toppling Saddam Hussein was to guarantee continued access to Iraq’s oil.

The consequence of our perpetual dependence, subject as it is to these multiple vulnerabilities, could lead not only to a crippled economy, it could lead to further wars. This is the dilemma brought about by our years of indulgence and complacency, our lack of foresight, our failure to develop alternative energy sources long ago.      

 - SCW

Yet to come in this series: inroads of sovereign wealth funds, competition for oil, the end of "easy oil" and the question of peak oil.