/ 25 November 2008

Trouble on oil waters

Crude Continent: The struggle for africa’s oil prize by Duncan Clarke (Profile Books)

This review is marginally hybrid in that it contains reference to comment made in an interview with the author, Duncan Clarke. And a further note: it presents contending views because I maintain my right, indeed my obligation, to be critical.

First, a canter through the content of this daunting volume; one in which 674 pages of close-typed, intricately inter-related information is gathered in five parts. The author’s acknowledgements aside, these comprise 31 chapters — far, far too much for a summary review. So, seeking a suitably concise report, I have opted for an abstracted overview and then a hurried dip into part 5, Africa’s oil locomotive.

Part 1 focuses on the historical and recent literature on African oil against which readers may weigh the analytical data in succeeding chapters. Clarke refers here to the many historians who have sought to interpret the so-called ”dark continent”. For, he writes, ”it is on Africa’s historical foundations that the modern oil industry rests”. Inter alia he coins the phrase ”African medievalism” to convey the side-by-side presence of what he depicts as ancient and modern economies.

He calls also on three related scrambles for Africa. The first was initiated in 1884/85, with the next proceeding from 1957 onward. Currently, there are the frenetic ”scrambles for hydrocarbons engaging [the] Great Powers and a multitude of companies, including state players from all continents”.

Part 2 covers at length — and ranges from, say, Guinea the Horn of Africa and the edges of southern Africa — the intense competition among and between private and state enterprises to control hydrocarbon resources under the surrounding oceans as well as on land. This mammoth task occupies the 16 chapters Clarke uses to examine the ”collage of acute differentiation and undeniable complexity … [that] define this landscape within which oil and gas companies operate.”

Then part 3, in which four chapters encompass much. Here the author elaborates on ”the money matrix [as] a key driver in African hydrocarbons” — a factor that inexorably involves powerful political interests and assertive, not to say aggressive, geo strategic policies. All this ”with Africa’s oil a prize that competing parties seek to make their own” — and where Africans themselves push for a share of that prize.

Part 4 comprises five chapters centring primarily on the worldwide ”oil game” played within and beyond the continent. The author identifies 500 corporate participants in African exploration. Their survival hinges on the differing economic and political strategies that are located in varying national and local portfolios. They tend to operate under the purported surveillance of their host states.

Finally come part 5’s two chapters in which Clarke — a long-time adviser/consultant to the industry — touches on expectations apropos future developments. In addition, he deals with many of the assumptions commonly attributed to the industry; particularly, as the title of one of these chapters emphasises, ”the ultra-fashionable African ‘oil curse”’, about which he is impatiently dismissive.

The fears and/or doubts expressed vis-á-vis extracting hydrocarbon products are discounted — firmly, summarily, with no less subjectivity than Clarke himself ascribes to those who voice them. These folk are, he contends, interfering and ”agenda-driven political activists.” They focus on conjured-up, imagined matters such as structurally imbalanced economies, looted resources, corrupt governments, benefits that accrue solely to local elites, politicians with hefty overseas bank deposits … and much more.

A case in point is corruption, about which one is told, ”companies that we know insist it is not just against corporate ethics, but too high a risk”. Corporate ethics, high risks? Try these as balms for the victims of Enron’s upper-managerial machinations. Or, as solace for the unfulfilled promises to local populations; like the protestors’ attacks on oil pipe-lines which led, in Nigeria, to short-shrift trials and executions. Enough. I have now unveiled my propensity for agenda-driven political activism!

Secure in this knowledge, I asked Clarke about the concept of peak oil which, as I recall, is not mentioned in his book. The issue — very briefly, when available resources are depleted for usage then to diminish progressively — has been aired by oil specialists for decades. Moreover, the topic has recently surfaced in print, electronic and television media. With characteristic prolixity, he replied that the notion is a ”flat-earth”, ”apocalyptic”, ”Ruritanian” myth — a tool, probably, for all manner of agenda-driven agitprop.

This in the face of contrary statements by, among a list of instances, oil luminaries such as Dr James Schlesinger, former United States Energy Secretary (in November 2005), William Rees Mogg (July 2007), Jeroem van de Veer, the Shell company’s chief executive (January 2008), and even George W Bush (2008). And nearer home, though probably too late for the book, Shokri Ghanem, who heads the National Oil Corporation of Libya (June 2008).

For my part, Clarke’s impressive familiarity with African oil apart, the book is unconvincing. Given humankind’s immediately threatened dependence on oil energy, continued exploration can be little but amelioratory patchwork. Preparing alternatives — as, for instance, the burgeoning Transition Towns movement in Britain, and elsewhere, seems of far more significant import. Except, perhaps, for oil entrepreneurs.