• Gas potentially more unifying than oil -   Nigel J. Lucas

• Energy, US national security and the Middle East -   R. James Woolsey

Iraqi oil: black gold or curse?
 Jaafar Altaie

The world's most advanced economy and largest oil consumer, the United States, is likely to spearhead efforts to develop alternative energy sources on a global scale. When this happens, producers are likely to respond to a diminishing oil market by trying to diversify their economies to reduce dependence on oil exports. Until such a process begins to materialize, high dependence on oil is a short-term reality for consumers and producers.

According to the US Department of Energy, 2024 world oil demand is forecast to rise by an average of 1.2 percent per year. In a low economic growth scenario this takes demand from a 2024 average of 403.9 million barrels per day (mbpd) to 477.5 mbpd in 2024. In a high growth scenario, demand is forecast to increase by 2.4 percent per year, from 403.9 mpbd to 491.1 mpbd in 2024.

Jaafar Altaie is a geopolitical analyst with over 10 years experience in Iraqi geopolitics, with emphasis on the energy and financial sectors. He currently runs his own consulting practice in Iraq.

There is mounting evidence that the production of oil throughout the world will reach a peak in the next two decades or, at best, will grow only slowly over the period. The most optimistic estimates, such as that of the US Department of Energy's International Energy Outlook 2024, envisage oil production increasing from about 80 million barrels a day now to 120 million barrels a day by 2024. This is equivalent to annual growth of about two percent a year, but the large developing countries show economic growth of five or six percent a year and even more rapid growth in vehicle ownership and oil consumption. With present trends, China alone would take half of the projected increase to 2024. And this is the most optimistic of scenarios; many experts think that peak oil is only a few years away.

The implications are serious both for countries that have few energy resources and for those that have based their development on oil products. Convenient to use and easy to transport, petroleum products are the easy way to run a country. The affordability and availability of oil and oil products has been an important contributor to development. That affordability and availability will certainly be much reduced in the next 20 years. For the Middle East this discriminator will be important. Within the region, some countries have large reserves of oil and some have none. Forty years ago, both groups benefited from the development of oil: it was the basis of development for all and producers collected rents. When oil was cheap this distinction was tolerable; for many years it has been less tolerable and in the future it may be a source of friction.

Another hydrocarbon fuel, more expensive to produce and more expensive to transport, is gas. Within the region and around its edges, lie more than half of the known gas reserves in the world. Egypt and Algeria together have four percent of proven reserves; Iran has 15 percent; in other countries around the Caspian there is another four percent; Qatar has nine percent and Russia, outside the region but a potential supplier, has 30 percent of proven world reserves. Europe is interested in these reserves of course, because it is a huge importer of energy. Gas is potentially more unifying than oil. Many countries of the Middle East could reap the direct and indirect benefits of this communality of interest between Europe and the producing countries. The direct benefits are transit payments and the indirect benefits arise because the need to carry vast volumes of gas to Europe makes the fuel available to others along the way and permits the development of smaller deposits in the region that might be hard to develop in their own right. Turkey is a key country in this with access to Russian, Iranian and Central Asian resources, and is potentially an important transit country from the Gulf States through to Europe.

The opportunity has not gone unnoticed, either in Europe or in the region. The Barcelona Declaration in 1995 between the European Union and the 12 Mediterranean partners committed the countries to work toward a free trade area through policies based on the principles of market economy and the integration of their economies by 2024. This free trade area would include energy. Nothing much happened in the period immediately following the treaty, but four or five years ago the process was re-launched and progress has been made. The year 2024 has been declared the Year of the Mediterranean in recognition of the tenth anniversary of the Barcelona Process. The bilateral association agreements that are the key feature of the implementation of the partnership have now been signed with all countries; the final agreement with Syria was concluded in October 2024.

Of course the ambitions of the Barcelona progress go far beyond gas; the main aim is to create a region of economic and political stability on the borders of the EU; a rather abstract aim for which enthusiasm has perhaps been lost as the pace of reform in the Middle East continues to disappoint and the region, not always of its own volition, persists in ceaseless political turmoil. But gas is a common, concrete cause of sufficient importance to all partners to concentrate the mind.

Much has been done in the Arab states to develop the use of gas for domestic and bi-lateral purposes. Construction of the Arab Gas Pipeline has begun; the pipeline from El Arish to the port of Aqaba in south Jordan has been completed and is now being extended to north Jordan and will eventually link to the gas system of Syria and will supply Lebanon. Regional institutional arrangements have also been provided for the marketing of pipeline services and regulation of the operation. Eventually the gas pipeline could be extended further north and could link into the Turkish system and the pipelines to Europe.

When political conditions permit, Israel will be an important player in this regional market; it offers a large market and access to Mediterranean ports; it can be supplied initially from Egypt and subsequently from further east. The reserves of gas that have been proven off-shore Gaza should be developed in any Israeli-Egyptian accord and would provide useful economic support to Palestine. Turkey could become a gas-hub--the physical basis for a spot market in gas from Russia, the Middle East and Central Asia. Egypt could provide a similar service for Gaza gas and its own sources, eventually including other players from the Middle East.

What is now needed is a political initiative on a scale to match the importance of the undertaking both for the security of supply of energy to Europe and for the support of economic development in the Middle East. The implications are above all important for the eastern Mediterranean. The Mahgreb countries are in a process of integrating their energy markets with Spain and then into Europe and there are not so many strategic consequences in the Mahgreb. But in the Eastern Mediterranean there is a lot to play for.

The solution cannot be dramatic; the scope is too great to be amenable to a single common action. Progress must be systemic and depends on two main factors: first, a common approach to the management of gas networks and second, vast financial resources to construct the pipelines. But the elements are there. The principles of common carriage and third party access are well established; the European Investment Bank has money for infrastructure projects to underpin regional markets; and commercial banks will always be happy to fund financially viable projects with serious partners.

What is lacking is a convincing partnership between the public and private sectors. The implementation of such a vision can easily be conceived at the extremes of the political spectrum. At the extreme of the state controlled economy, which probably characterizes most of the Middle Eastern countries, the governments get together and decide and then state corporations implement and the consumer picks up any loss; so all that is needed is planning. At the liberal extreme, which probably characterizes the European position, government sets the rules of the market and then lets private enterprise get on with it; so all that is needed is reform. For many reasons neither extreme is viable in this context. It needs private enterprise and it needs agreed rules and it needs reform, but it also needs political vision. In the Year of the Mediterranean it would be fitting that the EU-Mediterranean governments, with the participation of those countries beyond the region, provide that vision.- Published 5/5/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org

Nigel J. Lucas is a retired professor of energy policy at Imperial College, London, and a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK. He has worked extensively across Europe and Asia, and for the last three years directed a project on energy sector reform in the Middle East and North Africa.

Improving America's oil security is the most significant near-term energy challenge the US faces. It is my personal opinion that there are at least seven major reasons why dependence on petroleum for the lion's share of the world's transportation fuel creates special dangers in our time.

First, the current transportation infrastructure is committed to oil and oil-compatible products. This fact substantially increases the difficulty of responding to oil price increases or disruptions in supply by substituting other fuels. Moreover, it leads to the conclusion that to have an impact on our vulnerabilities within the next decade or two, any new types of vehicles and any fuel that would compete with products derived from conventional oil for the transportation fuel market will need to be compatible with the existing energy infrastructure and require only modest additions or amendments to it.

Secondly, the Greater Middle East will continue to be the low-cost and dominant petroleum producer for the foreseeable future. Home of around two-thirds of the world's proven reserves of conventional oil--45 percent of it in just Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran--the Greater Middle East will inevitably have to meet a growing percentage of increasing world oil demand. For the foreseeable future, as long as vehicular transportation is dominated by oil as it is today, the Greater Middle East, and especially Saudi Arabia, will remain in the driver's seat.

Third, the petroleum infrastructure is highly vulnerable to terrorist and other attack. The Islamist movement, pre-eminently al-Qaeda, has on a number of occasions explicitly called for world-wide attacks on the petroleum infrastructure and has carried some out in the Greater Middle East. Successful hits on major refineries, oil pipelines, or sulfur-cleaning towers could send oil prices much higher than even today's elevated prices.

Fourth, the possibility exists, particularly under regimes that could come to power in the Greater Middle East, of embargoes or other disruptions of supply. It is often said that whoever governs the oil-rich nations of the Greater Middle East will need to sell their oil. This is, however, not true if the rulers choose to try to live, for all intents and purposes, in the seventh century. There was a serious Islamist coup attempt in Saudi Arabia in 1979. Osama bin Laden has advocated, for example, major reductions in oil production.

Fifth, wealth transfers from oil have been used, and continue to be used, to fund terrorism and its ideological support. Some $85-90 billion has been spent from sources in Saudi Arabia in the last 30 years spreading Wahhabi beliefs throughout the world. Some oil-rich families of the Greater Middle East fund terrorist groups directly. The Wahhabi doctrine--fanatically hostile to Shi'ite and Sufi and many other Muslims, Jews, Christians, women, modernity, and much else--plays a role with respect to Islamist terrorist groups similar to that played in the decades after WWI with respect to Nazism by angry German nationalism. Not all angry German nationalists became Nazis and not all those educated in the Wahhabi tradition become terrorists. But in each case the broader movement has provided the soil in which the fully totalitarian movement has grown. Whether in lectures in the madrassahs of Pakistan, in the textbooks printed by Wahhabis for Indonesian schoolchildren, or on the bookshelves of mosques in the US, the hatred spread by the Wahhabis, supported by oil wealth, is evident.

Sixth, the current account deficits for a number of countries create risks ranging from major world economic disruption to deepening poverty and could be substantially reduced by reducing oil imports. The US, in essence, borrows about $13 billion per week, principally now from major Asian states, to finance its consumption. Oil is an extremely large category of imports; more than $2 billion per week of this borrowing is used to import it. This degree of borrowing and the accumulated debt increases the risk of a flight from the dollar or major increases in interest rates. Any such development could have major negative economic consequences for both the US and its trading partners. For developing nations the debt they incur to import oil acts as a major drag on their ability to emerge from national poverty.

And finally, global warming gas emissions from man-made sources create at least the risk of climate change. Although the point is not universally accepted, the weight of scientific opinion suggests that global warming gases (GWG) produced by human activity are one important component of potential climate change. Efforts to reduce oil use will also provide benefits to help mitigate the impacts of climate change.

We need strong US action to increase global oil production. But we also need to reduce US oil consumption through enhanced vehicle fuel economy, such as with hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles, and through increased production of non-petroleum transportation fuels, such as cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel, that are compatible (unlike hydrogen) with the existing infrastructure. And in their interest and ours, we need to help our friends in the Middle East diversify their economies.- Published 5/5/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org

R. James Woolsey is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a member of the National Commission for Energy Policy, an independent bi-partisan group of 16 Americans.