ANWR
March 2005 will be remembered as the month that the U.S. Senate voted to approve drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) using a unique mechanism of attaching the legislation to a budget bill that needs only a majority vote instead of the 60 cloture votes that seem to have become the Senate norm. Senators approved oil drilling in ANWR by a vote of 51-49. Knowing they didn't have the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster, pro-drilling Senators tacked the drilling provision onto the filibuster-proof budget resolution proposal for 2006.
The Africn American community does not seem too concerned about ANWR one way or the other, although 92% of the CBC opposed drilling in 2003.
AAEA is promoting reparations in the form of certain federal lands and Alaskan oil land rights. The Interior Department should deed the land to interested African Americans who could conserve the land, hold it in trust, donate it to native Alaskans or lease the mineral rights to oil and gas companies. AAEA promotes this strategy regardless of the location of federal lands, whether it is in the Rocky Mountains, offshore, or elsewhere. Federal lands should be transferred to interested African Americans as a reparation. Preferred land would be those federal lands with oil and gas beneath the surface. The reparations for slavery issue could probably be completely resolved by deeding over the 19 million acres to African Americans (which could hold as much as 16 billion barrels of oil).
It is estimated that the Interior Department could start selling ANWR leases in 2007 with oil flowing to the lower 48 within ten years.
Shell Names Nigerian To Head Nigerian Subsidiary
July 2004 -- Royal Dutch/Shell named Basil Omiyi, a Nigerian, to head its largest African subsidiary. The appointment of the first African to hold such a senior post for an oil multinational was a bid to appease Nigerian unions and ethnic groups threatening production shutdowns. The 58-year-old Omiyi will become managing director of Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd. on Sept. 1, 2004.Shell is the biggest oil company in Nigeria, accounting for half of the 2.5 million barrels pumped daily here. Nigeria is Africa's largest oil exporter, the world's seventh-largest oil exporter and the fifth-biggest source of U.S. oil imports. Nigerian labor unions and ethnic leaders have repeatedly threatened to shut down oil production to protest the relative absence of Nigerians in top management positions. Industrial disputes, ethnic clashes, sabotage of wells, and kidnappings of oil workers by militants have at times in the past year shut down nearly 40 percent of Nigeria's oil production.
It is ashamed that host communities of oil-producing areas such as Nigeria have put themselves in the position of having to beg for high-level jobs. There is still the possibility of a national oil workers' strike over pensions and demands for repairs to government-owned oil refineries.
Oil Prices Rising
Mar 2004 - - Crude oil in New York rose above $37 a barrel for the first time in a year on concern that unrest in Venezuela will limit exports from the South American country. Venezuela is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' third-biggest producer. Prices also gained on speculation that rising gasoline demand and new U.S. fuel regulations may spur higher prices during the peak warm-weather driving months.
Feb 2004 - - The U.S. crude oil benchmark price is $36 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil prices should stay around $30 a barrel in 2004.
America Drives to Work On African Oil America imported more than 10 percent of its oil from two African countries in 2001: Nigeria and Angola. By 2015, Africa could be providing 25 percent of America’s oil needs, according to National Intelligence Council estimates cited in “African Oil: A Priority for U.S. National Security and African Development,” a white paper recently released by the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG), a consortium of policy makers and energy producers. Africa and America have much to offer one another, in particular, energy security for this country and economic development for Africa. Congress should begin taking serious steps toward securing such a future.
In the first half of 2002, the U. S. imported 110 million barrels of crude oil from Iraq. African sources could eventually help soften price shocks during times of upheaval in the Middle East.
African oil has other advantages. Much of it lies beneath the Atlantic or near the West African coast, which makes it simpler to transport to the United States than oil from the Persian Gulf or the Caspian Sea. Nigeria is the only sub-Saharan country that belongs to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which means that much of Africa's new production will not be constrained by any cartel quotas. Gabon was an OPEC member but quit in 1995, and Nigeria is considering quitting. Nigeria is the largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa and the fifth-largest exporter of oil to the United States.
Nigeria is expected to raise production over 3 million barrels a day by 2007, from 2.2 million now, according to the Petroleum Finance Company. Angola's daily production is projected to double, to nearly 2 million barrels. Chad is expected to produce 225,000 barrels a day once a $3.5 billion pipeline through Cameroon is completed in 2004. Production in tiny Equatorial Guinea is expected nearly to double, to 350,000 barrels a day, within three years.
Chad's pipeline is being threatened by some environmental groups. Environmental groups are critical of lending by U.S.-subsidized banks, which include the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Asian Development Bank and African Development Bank. The groups contend these public agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID), back projects -- oil and gas wells, dams, pipelines and logging -- that accelerate the destruction of fragile, diverse and dwindling ecosystems. AAEA believes the pipeline is important for Chad and for America's energy security. Adequate environmental assessments should be conducted expiditiously to assure speedy and environmentally friendly construction of such projects.
Eight environmental groups -- including the Bank Information Center, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and Friends of the Earth -- complained to Congress in June that environmental oversight of public-bank lending had weakened significantly. The group also singled out the handling of a U.S. AID critique of a $3.7 billion oil pipeline to be built by an Exxon-Mobil-led consortium from Chad to Cameroon's Atlantic coast. World Bank agencies lent the project $140 million.
Before the World Bank vote, U.S. AID officials had said Chad and Cameroon failed to perform an adequate assessment of the pipeline's impact on the ecosystem. But a Treasury representative at the World Bank backed the project anyway. In a draft of the same report to Congress, a U.S. AID reviewer faulted the Chad-Cameroon process because it used an environmental assessment produced by the oil consortium rather than one supervised by the governments, as required by World Bank policies.
