This April, the gas sector news centered around the traditional issues
of production, supplies, and plans for the cultivation of recently
discovered deposits occasionally bordered on battlefield reports. The
events which were drawing media coverage hardly warrant the nervous
projections about a prelude to a series of full-blown conflicts but do
lend extra credibility to Z. Brzezinski's fairly old assessment that
World War III over the dwindling global energy resources has long become
an objective reality.
At least three developments related to the energy sector must be
mentioned in the context of the crumbling global energy security. Early
this April, gunmen in Yemen blew up the 38-inch pipeline used to feed
gas to the Balhaf LNG terminal, disrupting the operations of Yemen LNG,
which is run by France's Total. The media attributed the attack to Al
Qaeda which supposedly avenged the killing of several militants by a US
drone hours earlier, but it has to be taken into account that LNG from
the Arabian Peninsula is, under long-term contracts, supplied by GDF
Suez S.A., Total, and Korea Gas Corporation (KOGAS) exclusively to
Europe and Asia and, from Al Qaeda's perspective, attacking a European
company's facilities not geared towards the US should have made no
sense.
A week later, a blast damaged a gas pipeline in the proximity of al
Arish, in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula. The infrastructure
used to be an avenue for gas supply from Egypt to Israel and Jordan, and
was, at the time of the attack, defunct after the previous attack which
took place on February 5.
Moreover, the April explosion was the 14th
one to hit the pipeline. Back in November, Egypt's currently ruling
Muslim Brotherhood pledged an array of security measures for the transit
route including the installation of a monitoring system and the hiring
of local Bedouins to patrol the adjacent area, but the plan failed to
take off the ground, evidently due to the difficulty of cutting a deal
with the Bedouins.
The third pertinent development was the "Noble Dina" joint military
exercise performed by the navies and air forces of Israel, the US, and
Greece. It is wildly held that the purpose behind the initiative was to
send a message to Turkey concerning the dispute over the ownership of
the natural gas reserves discovered in the East Mediterranean. While
Cyprus pressed a claim on the fields which the country believes to be
located in its exclusive economic zone, a rival bid followed immediately
from Turkey, the founder and guarantor of the hitherto unrecognized
North Cyprus. It factors into the disposition that the relations between
Ankara and Tel Aviv soured after the raid of the Gaza flotilla by
Israeli commandos who killed Turkish citizens in the operation. In 2010,
Turkey and Israel suspended their formerly intense cooperation in the
military sphere. It did not evade watchers that the hypothetic enemy in
the framework of the "Noble Dina" drill in most regards closely
resembled the Turkish forces.
The chronic though so far under-critical tensions in the Persian Gulf,
where the confrontation between Iran and the US threatens to escalate
into an armed conflict, further casts a shadow over the situation
outlined above. Peace in the region is fragile and does not promise to
last. Washington seems to be undecided at the moment, but years of
pressure on the global public opinion to embrace air strikes against
Iran's nuclear infrastructures as an inescapable option left no doubt
that a military campaign against the country is brewing. On the other
hand, Washington, which as of today clearly props up the Sunni Muslim
radicals in North Africa and the Middle East, may also be considering
some sort of a secret deal with the Iranian Shiites. If the scenario
materializes, Tel Aviv's potential response will be to launch an
independent snap offensive against Iran, leaving the US - a strategic
ally of Israel - with no choice but to push the war to the victorious
completion. For President Obama, the Nobel Prize winner for peace, that
would obviously be an ill favor, especially with the presidential poll
in the US at hand. Obama still has to cope with the dragging war against
the Talibs in Afghanistan, which is a serious burden despite the
opportunities it opens up to test new armaments, to train the US forces
under real-life combat conditions, to dish out to the
military-industrial complex heavy chunks of the US budgetary pie, and to
keep drugs from the region flooding Europe and Russia.
Deciding in favor of a war with Iran would become easier for Washington
in the mid-term, when progress in shale gas and off-beat oil extraction
technologies will help the US become self-sufficient in terms of energy
supply – that is, if by the time efforts to install a pro-Western
clique in Tehran or to plunge Iran into chaos like Libya remain
unsuccessful. Then, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and a pause in
oil supplies from the region will not frighten the US, even combined
they send the cost of crude sky-rocketing. Europe will similarly
insulate itself from the trouble: chances are the brisk EU sanctions
meant to tone down the oil import from the region reflect a profound
future-oriented strategy.
At this point the news that prosecutors in Libya are screening foreign
energy companies for financial abuse must not take anybody by surprise.
Considering that Total and Italy's Eni are mentioned in connection with
the probe, it is clear that, again, European grands are the ones to face
problems.
In the meantime, history appears to be repeating itself and
commentators increasingly suspect the US of trying to undermine Russia's
revenue sources as it had undermined those of the USSR in the Soviet
era. Washington's rediscovered approach is to transform the global
energy market in a way that would immediately cause the net earnings
from the Russian gas and oil exports to contract. Whereas in the case of
the Soviet Union Saudi Arabia was instrumental in implementing the US
energy strategy, these days the role is going to be given to Qatar, a
country sitting on the world's third-largest natural gas reserves and
ranking sixth among global gas exporters (Qatar also occupies the 21st line in the list of oil-exporting countries).
Recently Qatar, an emirate collecting immense gains from energy export,
attracted unwaivering attention from the international energy policy
watchers. The tiny country was spotted among the top sponsors of the
Arab Spring, massively sent weapons and instructors to various Islamist
opposition groups, and is obviously determined to parlay its economic
potential into political influence in the vast region stretching from
the Persian Gulf to Syria and Algeria.
Qatar intends to radically widen its niche in the LNG export in 2014
and on by reinforcing its positions on the Asian and European energy
markets. In Europe, Qatar will therefore emerge as a key competitor to
Russia's Gazprom which supplies natural gas to the continent via a
pipeline network. Qatar invests in extensive LNG infrastructures in
Europe and eyes partnerships with established European energy players,
while constructing a giant domestic LNG terminal and new pipelines
linking the facility to its inland gas fields.
Once out of the building docks, every one of a fleet of 25
Q-Max huge LNG-carriers commissioned by Qatar will enable the transit of
150 million cu m of natural gas per trip, giving a boost to the
country's LNG expansion. No doubt, since Qatar's ambitions are backed by
the US Exxon Mobil, the capacities will serve to erode Russia's status
of the biggest natural gas supplier to Europe. There is a feeling that
the Washington neocons who, at best, see Russia as a US vassal in a
coming confrontation with China, hope to use the capabilities to coerce
Russia into a complete refusal from any independent foreign policies...
A fresh study jointly released by the Energy Research Institute of the
Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Energy Agency - a global
energy forecast spanning till 2035 – says: “Tensions in North Africa and
the Middle East are rising and the regions' discords (between the Sunni
and the Shia Muslims, various tribes, and political factions) will
persist into the foreseeable future. Over the forecast period, the oil
output and consumption in the regions will drop by 10% and 5%
respectively. Oil production in Iran will come to a grinding halt and
oil consumption will plummet in 2013-2019 (the term is calculated based
on the outcomes of the previous wars). In Iraq, production will shed 50%
and consumption will stagnate. Production will revert to normal in Iraq
by 2020 and gradually reach a healthy level within 3-4 years in Iran”.
Simply put, experts thus foretell that a war with Iran will break out
next year. Even if the projection is rooted in risky conspiracy theories
and is needlessly alarmist, the sheer number of chilling forecasts and
energy-related incidents spells disaster. Indications multiply that the
moment when the global war over energy resources will switch from the
cold to the hot phase is close ahead.
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2012/04/15/world-war-iii-an-energy-war.html
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