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Tags: africa, extractive, energy, industry, petroleum, oil, security, multinational, corporations, international, development on 2008-08-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

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BBC NEWS | Africa | 'Blood oil' dripping from Nigeria

Under cover of night dozens of barges queue up to dock at a jetty in a creek somewhere in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta.

Their holds are filled with stolen oil running from valves illegally installed into a pipeline.

Tags: energy, energy.news, oil, africa, nigeria on 2008-08-03 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Africa: The Next Victim in Our Quest for Cheap Oil | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet

Tags: michael, watts, nigeria, oil, industry, petroleum, petro-capitalism, complex, curse, resource on 2008-07-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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A Kodak moment: The not-so-historic Talabani-Barak handshake

Tags: israel, iraq, us, intervention, palestine, middle, east, oil, opinion on 2008-07-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Petrobras to pump Nigerian oil field

Brazilian state oil company Petrobras will start pumping oil from a Nigerian field on July 21, company officials said on Saturday.

Tags: petrobras, nigeria, nigerian, oil, field, petrobas, pump, in, nigera, petroleum, industry, brazil on 2008-07-12 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The attack on Ecuador

Tags: colombia, ecuador, development, politics, imperialism, multinational, corporations, oil, industry, us, castro, latin, america on 2008-07-12 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

The oil crisis in global context

the context is dramatically different from that of the economic crisis of the '70s. Today, there is no crisis of balance of payment (so far) and there is lots of foreign exchange reserves. There are vibrant domestic markets in India and China. In fact, the growth is sustained by the economic growth in Asia.

Tags: oil, petroleum, crisis, international, development, globalization, pambazuka on 2008-06-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Harvard Political Review - Oil and Development in Africa

The Chad-Cameroon pipeline, a World Bank-sponsored project aimed at bringing Chadian oil to Cameroon ’s Atlantic ports, represents successful cooperation between governments, oil companies, NGOs, and international monetary bodies. If oil-rich African states continue to forge such partnerships, the chances of cashing in on the development potential of mineral wealth will be greatly increased.

Tags: petroleum, oil, industry, africa, international, development, chad, cameroon, nigeria, angola, botswana on 2008-06-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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BBC NEWS | Africa | Chad's oil watchdog 'powerless'

A committee set up to oversee oil revenues in Chad has protested about lack of resources from the government and oil company involved.
The central African state became an oil producer last year.

The committee was set up under a World Bank plan to tr

Tags: exxon, mobil, mekombe, chad, corruption, cameroon, oil, petroleum, pipeline on 2008-06-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Bottom_of_the_Barrel_English_PDF.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Tags: catholic, relief, services, petroleum, industry, petro-capitalism, africa, world, bank, international, development, oil on 2008-06-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Energy | Double, double, oil and trouble | Economist.com

As different as these theories are, they share a conviction that something has gone badly wrong with the market for oil. High prices are seen as proof of some sort of breakdown. Yet the evidence suggests that, to the contrary, the rising price is beginning to curb demand and increase supply, just as the textbooks say it should.

Tags: oil, price, crisis, petro-capitalism, petroleum, economist.com on 2008-05-31 -All Annotations (0) -About

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They're wrong about oil, by George | Anatole Kaletsky - Times Online

consider the situation today in oil markets: the Gulf, according to Mr Rothman, is crammed with supertankers chartered by oil-producing governments to hold the inventories of oil they are pumping but cannot sell. That physical oil is in excess supply at today's prices does not mean that producers are somehow cheating by storing their oil in tankers or keeping it in the ground. All it suggests is that there are few buyers for physical oil cargoes at today's prices, but there are plenty of buyers for pieces of paper linked to the price of oil next month and next year. This situation is exactly analogous to the bubble in credit markets a year ago, where nobody wanted to buy sub-prime mortgage bonds, but there was plenty of demand for “financial derivatives” that allowed investors to bet on the future value of these bonds.

Tags: oil, price, inflation, soros, rothman, kaletsky on 2008-05-25 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Nigeria During and After the Oil Boom: A Policy Comparison with Indonesia -- Pinto 1 (3): 419 -- The World Bank Economic Review

Tags: indonesia, world, bank, international, development, nigeria, oil, industry, pinto, neoliberal on 2008-05-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

in list: Suharto, World Bank and Intl Development

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Unilever makes sustainable palm oil pledge - Telegraph

Greenpeace singled out Unilever as a target for demonstrations recently because, it alleged, the company's suppliers were destroying orang-utan habitats and clearing Indonesia's peatland rainforests to plant palms.

Tags: unilever, palm, oil, sustainability, environment, deforestation, greenpeace, csr on 2008-05-12 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Monthly Review September 2006 Michael Watts ¦ Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa

In reality what is on offer is an even bleaker world of military neoliberalism. At one pole are enclaves of often militarily fortified accumulation (of which the oil complex is the paradigmatic case) and the violent, sometimes chaotic, markets so graphica

Tags: angola, development, empire, history, imperialism, kenya, nigeria, oil, us, michael, watts, compliance, human, rights on 2008-05-11 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Although Africa is not as well endowed in hydrocarbons (both oil and gas) as
the Gulf states, the continent “is all set to balance power,” and as
a consequence it is “the subject of fierce competition by energy
companies.” IHS Energy—one of the oil industry’s major
consulting companies—expects African oil production, especially along the
Atlantic littoral, to attract “huge exploration investment”
contributing over 30 percent of world liquid hydrocarbon production by 2010.
Over the last five years when new oilfield discoveries were scarce, one in
every four barrels of new petroleum discovered outside of Northern America was
found in Africa. A new scramble is in the making. The battleground consists of
the rich African oilfields
Africa is, according to the
intelligence community, the “new frontier” in the fight against
revolutionary Islam. Energy security, it turns out, is a terrifying hybrid of
the old and the new: primitive accumulation and American militarism coupled to
the war on terror.
To see the African crisis, however, as a moral or ethical failure on the
part of the “international community” (not least in its failure to
meet the pledges promised by the Millennium Development Goals of reducing
poverty by half by 2015) is only a partial truth. The real crisis of Africa is
that after twenty-five years of brutal neoliberal reform, and savage World Bank
structural adjustment and IMF stabilization, African development has failed
catastrophically.
The pillaging and privatization of the
state—whatever its African “pathologies”—and the African
commons is the most extraordinary spectacle of accumulation by dispossession,
all made in the name of foreign assistance. The involution of the African city,
notes Davis, has as its corollary not an insurgent lumpenproletariat but rather
a vast political universe of Islamism and Pentecostalism. It is this occult
world of invisible powers—whether populist Islam in Kano or witchcraft in
Soweto—that represents the most compelling ideological legacy of
neoliberal utopianism in Africa.
The African accumulation crisis, and the dynamics of capital and trade
flows, are in practice complex and uneven. In addition to oil (and the very few
cases of manufacturing growth in places like Mauritius which are little more
than national export-processing platforms), the other source of economic
dynamism is the (uneven) emergence of global value chains. This can be seen
especially in relation to high-value agricultures (fresh fruits and vegetables)
in South Africa, flowers in Kenya, green beans in Senegal. Such forms of
contract production, typically buyer-driven commodity chains in which retailers
exert enormous power, have created islands of agrarian capitalism that
contribute to and deepen patterns of existing inequality across Africa and
further the interests of business elites, which are often not African. The
deepening of commodification in the countryside in tandem with demographic
pressures (caused as much by civil war and displacement as high fertility
regimes) has made land struggles a vivid part of the new landscape of African
development.
It is no surprise that against this backdrop the development establishment
flails around wildly. On the one side stands former World Bank economist
William Easterly for whom all aid (“planning”) has been a total (and
unaccountable) failure.
On the
other stands the one-man industry otherwise known as Jeffrey Sachs who seeks to
expand foreign aid—$30 billion a year for Africa—and to
initiate a Global Compact by which “the rich will help save the
poor,” who are as much hampered by poor physical geography as governance
failure.
In reality what is on offer is an even bleaker world of military
neoliberalism. At one pole are enclaves of often militarily fortified
accumulation (of which the oil complex is the paradigmatic case) and the
violent, sometimes chaotic, markets so graphically depicted in the documentary
film Darwin’s Nightmare. At the other pole are the black holes of
recession, withdrawal, and uneven commodification. These complex trajectories
of accumulation are dominated at this moment by the centrality of extraction
and a return to primary commodity production.
All African governments have organized their oil sectors through state oil
companies that have some forms of collaborative venture with the major
transnational oil companies (customarily operated through oil leases and joint
memoranda of understanding).
In general the international oil companies
operating in Africa have production share arrangements with state oil companies
(Nigeria is the exception which operates largely through joint ventures).
The nightmarish legacy of oil politics must be traced back to the heady boom
days of the 1970s. The boom detonated a huge influx of petro-dollars and
launched an ambitious (and largely autocratic) state-led modernization program.
Central to the operations of the new oil economy was the emergence of an
“oil complex” that overlaps with, but is not identical to, the
“petro-state.” The latter is comprised of several key institutional
elements: (1) a statutory monopoly over mineral exploitation, (2) a
nationalized (state) oil company that operates through joint ventures with oil
majors who are granted territorial concessions (blocs), (3) the security
apparatuses of the state (often working in a complementary fashion with the
private security forces of the companies) who ensure that costly investments
are secured, (4) the oil producing communities themselves within whose
customary jurisdiction the wells are located, and (5) a political mechanism by
which oil revenues are distributed.
The oil revenue distribution question—whether in a federal system like
Nigeria or in an autocratic monarchy like Saudi Arabia—is an indispensable
part of understanding the combustible politics of imperial oil.
there has been a process of radical fiscal
centralism in which the oil-producing states (composed of ethnic minorities)
have lost and the non-oil producing ethnic majorities have gained—by fair
means or foul.
the oil complex. First, the geo-strategic interest in oil
means that military and other forces are part of the local oil complex. Second,
local and global civil society enters into the oil complex either through
transnational advocacy groups concerned with human rights and the transparency
of the entire oil sector, or through local social movements and NGOs fighting
over the consequences of the oil industry and the accountability of the
petro-state. Third, the transnational oil business—the majors, the
independents, and the vast service industry—are actively involved in the
process of local development through community development, corporate social
responsibility and stakeholder inclusion. Fourth, the inevitable struggle over
oil wealth—who controls and owns it, who has rights over it, and how the
wealth is to be deployed and used—inserts a panoply of local political
forces (ethnic militias, paramilitaries, separatist movements, and so on) into
the operations of the oil complex (the conditions in Colombia are an exemplary
case). In some circumstances oil operations are the object of civil wars.
Fifth, multilateral development agencies (the IMF and the IBRD) and financial
corporations like the export credit agencies appear as key “brokers”
in the construction and expansion of the energy sectors in oil-producing states
(and latterly the multilaterals are pressured to become the enforcers of
transparency among governments and oil companies). And not least, there is the
relationship between oil and the shady world of drugs, illicit wealth (oil
theft for example), mercenaries, and the black economy.
oil complex is a sort of corporate enclave economy but also a center of
political and economic calculation that can only be understood through the
operation of a set of local, national, and transnational forces that can be
dubbed as “imperial oil.” The struggle for resource control that has
taken center stage o
The current crisis points to the fact that the oil-producing region in
Nigeria now stands at the center of Nigerian politics—for four reasons.
First, the efforts led by a number of Niger Delta states for “resource
control” expanded access to and control over oil and oil revenues. Second,
there was the struggle for self-determination of minority peoples in the region
and the clamor for a sovereign national conference to rewrite the
constitutional basis of the federation itself. Third, there is a crisis of rule
in the region as a number of state and local governments are rendered helpless
by militant youth movements, growing insecurity, and ugly intra-community,
inter-ethnic, and state violence which—as the recent events point
out—can threaten the flow of oil and the much vaunted energy security of
the United States. And not least, there is the emergence of a so-called
South-South Alliance making for a powerful coalition of small and hitherto
politically marginalized oil producing states (Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River,
Delta, Ondo, and Rivers) capable of challenging the ruling ethnic majorities
(the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Ibo) in the run-up to the 2007 elections.
Not surprisingly the deadly operations of corporate oil, autocratic
petro-states, and the violent potentialities of the oil complex have forced the
question of transparency and accountability of oil operations onto the
international agenda. Tony Blair’s Extractive Industries Transparency
Initiative, the IMF’s oil diagnostics program, and the Soros
Foundation’s Revenue Watch are all (voluntary) efforts to provide a veneer
of respectability to a rank and turbulent industry. But the real action lies
elsewhere. The danger is that the ongoing U.S. militarization of the region
could amplify the presence of mercenaries and paramilitaries, creating
conditions not unlike those in Colombia.

The Oil Drum | Discussions about Energy and Our Future

Tags: energy, environment, oil, politics, peakoil, economics, blog, petro-capitalism, petroleum, industry on 2008-04-26 and saved by27 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Legal Oil

Theft of oil costs oil companies, governments (and the communities they serve) hundreds of millions of dollars each year in Nigeria alone. In addition to loss of revenue, oil theft fuels violence and insecurity, feeds corruption, finances the purchase of

Tags: international, business, petroleum, industry, oil, bunkering, nigeria, for:larsj8 on 2008-04-26 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Oil, Gas, Mining & Chemicals - Extractive Industries Review

Tags: world, bank, extractive, industry, petroleum, international, business, oil, gas, chemicals, mining on 2008-04-24 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Human Rights, Violence and the Oil Complex

Tags: oil, complex, michaelwatts, petroleum, industry, culture, identity, multinational, corporations, state, terror, human, rights on 2008-04-24 -All Annotations (0) -About

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ADB backs Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative | Bank Information Center: Monitoring the projects and policies of the World Bank, IMF and other international financial institutions

Following similar announcements by other multilateral development banks, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) last week endorsed the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).

Tags: eiti, asian, development, bank, news, extractive, industry, transparency, petroleum, oil on 2008-04-24 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Arabica Robusta's Bookmarks tagged oil → View Popular

Latest Issue

BBC NEWS | Africa | 'Blood oil' dripping from Nigeria

Africa: The Next Victim in Our Quest for Cheap Oil | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet

A Kodak moment: The not-so-historic Talabani-Barak handshake

Petrobras to pump Nigerian oil field

The attack on Ecuador

The oil crisis in global context

Harvard Political Review - Oil and Development in Africa

BBC NEWS | Africa | Chad's oil watchdog 'powerless'

Bottom_of_the_Barrel_English_PDF.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Energy | Double, double, oil and trouble | Economist.com

They're wrong about oil, by George | Anatole Kaletsky - Times Online

Nigeria During and After the Oil Boom: A Policy Comparison with Indonesia -- Pinto 1 (3): 419 -- The World Bank Economic Review

Unilever makes sustainable palm oil pledge - Telegraph

Monthly Review September 2006 Michael Watts ¦ Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa

The Oil Drum | Discussions about Energy and Our Future

Legal Oil

Oil, Gas, Mining & Chemicals - Extractive Industries Review

Human Rights, Violence and the Oil Complex

ADB backs Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative | Bank Information Center: Monitoring the projects and policies of the World Bank, IMF and other international financial institutions

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