Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

102Disasters Waiting to Happentailed many Albertan oil and syncrude activities, and price agreements withMexico do not always seem completely stable.But present U.S. oil imports are sadly lacking even in the safety of diversity.Nearly a third of the non-Communist world’s oil supply comes from the Gulf,and about a third of that comes from the highly congested area at the head ofthe Gulf. 12 “The sudden loss of Persian Gulf oil for a year,” warns former StateDepartment official Joseph Nye, “could stagger the world’s economy, disrupt it,devastate it, like no event since the Great Depression of the 1930s.” 13Within major oil-exporting countries, too, there is astonishing physical concentration.One Saudi oilfield, Ghawar, lifts five million barrels per day—morethan two Kuwaits, or Venezuela plus Nigeria, or any other country except theUnited States and the Soviet Union. Saudi Arabia lifts about seven to ten millionbarrels per day from a mere seven hundred wells, whereas the U.S., much furtheralong in its depletion cycle, lifts just over ten million barrels per day (includingnatural gas liquids) from some six hundred thousand wells. 14 The deliverysystems for that concentrated gush of Mideast oil tend to be tightly clustered ingroups, linked by some seven thousand miles of exposed pipelines. “The oilwells themselves are obvious targets[;] so are the collecting systems, which pumpoil through pipes from the fields to local terminal facilities. [These]...,containinggas-separation plants, local refineries, storage tanks, and loading facilities, couldalso be potential targets. And the pipelines and tankers carrying oil to destinationsbeyond the Gulf are no less vulnerable.” 15 For precisely this reason, militaryforce, even if it succeeded in capturing the oilfields, could not keep them runningin the face of a locally based program of sabotage. 16 Just the five hundred-oddmiles of pipelines in eastern Saudi Arabia carry about a sixth of the non-Communist world’s oil supply. And all the main Gulf oil ports, together withmost of the Saudi and United Arab Emirates oilfields, “are within nine hundredmiles (a ninety-minute subsonic flight) of the Soviet Union.” 17Saudi Arabia and the Persian GulfThese vulnerabilities come to a sharp focus in Saudi Arabia. 18 It providesa quarter of U.S. oil imports (that is, a twelfth of total U.S. oil supplies) fromthe world’s largest oil reserves—at the end of 1980, some one hundred sixtyeightbillion barrels. The marine terminals at Ras Tanura and at Ju’aymahhandle eighty-five percent of Saudi oil exports. A few minutes’ flight inland liethe key facilities in the Master Gas System, which when completed will providethree billion cubic feet of natural gas (and allied liquids) per day.Unfortunately, Ras Tanura and Ju’aymah happen to “lie at precisely the closestgeographic point to [Saudi Arabia’s] principal military threat, the Iranian