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

Chapter Nine: Oil and Gas 105•Following “fires and explosions, officially called accidents,” that “disrupted oilfields in Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s natural gas industry,” two fires in Sinai oilfields,and the establishment of a “Gulf Battlefield Unit” by the Popular Frontfor the Liberation of Palestine, seven Arab states and Iran established in 1975 ajoint intelligence program to protect their oil and gas facilities. By 1981 a moreselective “Gulf Cooperation Council” of Saudi allies was installing “a comprehensivesystem of electronic surveillance for the oil fields” and was discussingjoint air defense systems and a possible Persian Gulf armaments industry. 53•As 1982 began, a Lebanese oil tanker was rocketed while loading in Tripoli.The next day, the pipeline carrying Iraqi crude to Tripoli, just reopened aftera four-year interruption, was blown up by another rocket attack, shutting itdown again and causing a refinery fire. 54 Four days later, the six-hundredtwenty-five-milepipeline carrying Iraqi oil to Turkey’s Mediterranean coastwas blown up forty-two miles inside the Turkish border. 55Once laden, tankers must run a gauntlet of narrow sealanes where free passageis not always guaranteed. (Egypt, for example, blockaded the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, at the southern end of the Red Sea, in 1973.) About a fourth ofthe non-Communist world’s oil must pass through the Strait of Hormuz. ThePanama Canal is less heavily used but very easily blocked. The Straits ofMalacca and of Singapore and the Cape of Good Hope are among the otherstrategic passages. Securing these points, and indeed the shipping lanes on thehigh seas, is a formidable problem of naval strategy, though one beyond thescope of this book. Even given safe passage, the vulnerability of the huge, lumberingVery Large Crude Carriers needs little emphasis, as they manage nowand then to do themselves in without assistance. 56 Oil tankers of various sizeshave lately blown up or sunk themselves at a steeply increasing rate—averagingthree per month in 1980. 57 They are so slow and so sparsely crewed (about twentyfor a one-hundred-thousand-tonner) that during eight months in 1981, twenty-oneladen supertankers were boarded at sea or in harbor near Singapore, andtheir crews robbed of minor valuables, by medieval-style pirates in small nativeboats. 58 It is therefore not surprising that at the end of 1981 a sizable oil tanker,complete with cargo, was actually hijacked in the Strait of Malacca.Offshore platformsOffshore oil facilities are often proposed in the United States and elsewhereas a replacement for oil from the Persian Gulf. But even platforms in a country’sown territorial waters are highly vulnerable: sitting ducks laden withhighly flammable fuels under pressure. 59 The British Government’s five-ship,four-plane task force to patrol North Sea platforms, 60 and a group of com-