Introduction: Peak Oil
In November 2009, the UK newspaper the Guardian ran a series of articles on ‘Peak Oil’ highlighting, among other points, claims that the International Energy Agency (IEA) had been downplaying the extent of the decline in world oil reserves and hence future production capacity. These claims were denied by the IEA, but a commentary by the doyen of Peak Oil theory, Colin Campbell, provided his own estimate indicating that oil production of all types, including oil from shale and tar sands, peaked in 2008. In his view, conventional crude oil production peaked in 2005, a view which broadly corresponds to that of Matthew Simmons, another leading figure in the Peak Oil debate, who unfortunately died recently.
Campbell's work has been criticised as having predicted peak oil at earlier dates, only to be proved wrong. His estimate in 2009 explains that he did not have access to accurate data for quite a long time, but that this is now available. So there is more reason now to take his present claim seriously, especially when it corroborates other estimates which were independently arrived at. In any case, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) was predicting beforehand that the oil peak was likely to occur between 2004 and 2008, so it now seems that ASPO was broadly correct, at least in its predictions after the year 2000. For the purposes of debate, this article will assume that the oil peak has already arrived and it will examine some of the implications, particularly in Africa.
A series of websites has pointed out many of these implications, as well as providing regular updates on current economic problems believed to be related to the peak in oil production. Here I provide my own points, influenced by various sources. First, there is no easy substitute for oil in terms of the amount of energy per cubic centimetre. Second, there is an existing infrastructure for distribution and storage, which will be difficult to replace as energy supplies decline. Third, it is the major source of chemical feedstock for fertiliser, pesticides and various polymers. Fourth, while natural gas can be transformed into aviation fuel, and coal can be transformed into some petroleum-type products, this also takes energy, which will make substituting with these sources more difficult as overall world energy supplies decline. Fifth, this point also applies to some extent to solar, wind, tidal and hydroelectric power. They depend on physical inputs such as glass, steel, concrete and photovoltaic (PV) cells that take a fair amount of energy to produce. It has been argued that investing in such sources is borrowing from the future. At the end of their investment and operating life cycle, it is not entirely clear how they could be reproduced. It may be possible to produce cheaper PV cells in future, and there is news of cheaper wind power technology recently developed in Edinburgh, but the overall impact of these changes is not clear.
The above points all imply that the world is facing more serious economic difficulties than is usually envisaged in most commentaries about the current ‘recession’ or ‘downturn’. These terms give the impression that present difficulties are temporary, and that a return to growth will soon take place. The debate tends to be about whether the recession will have a V shape, a U shape or a W shape (the latter implying a double-dip recession). What is rarely considered is the possibility of something like an L shape, where recovery takes a very long time or does not take place at all. While that may seem depressingly pessimistic, unless viable alternatives to oil can be found,1 then ongoing economic contraction, or at best stasis, remains more likely than growth over the longer term.
Before attempting to explore at least some of the implications of Peak Oil for Africa, it is worth examining some of the main contenders for alternative sources of electrical power generation.
Peak Gas
There are greater reserves of natural gas now than of oil, and it will last for some years longer than oil; this makes sources of gas, including gas flared off from many oil wells, worth utilising as soon as possible to ease the transition to a post-oil world economy. One of the major sources of gas is Russia, and the recent discoveries of new reserves in the Arctic have already led to heightened military tension there. Because oil and natural gas frequently occur together, the political and economic implications are often discussed together, but the later peak in gas production will become increasingly important, and African sources will become the object of increasing competition. Such competition is already very clear in the Caucasus, Central Asia and East Asia, with various pipelines being proposed, and some already being built. As in Africa, one can discern a military approach to securing energy supplies by the US, backed by the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as against an economic approach adopted by China and other ‘emerging economies’.
Peak Coal
It is widely asserted that there is plenty of coal left, and the main problem is seen as being that its emissions of carbon dioxide are a problem for climate change. The US and China are then usually mentioned as the biggest users of coal for electricity generation, and the biggest threat to any policy of reduction of carbon emissions.2 However, while it is true that China is building a lot of new coal-fired power stations, and that the US is also increasing its capacity to a lesser extent, it is not entirely clear where the coal will come from, or how long it will last. To take the US as an example, since it has about one quarter of total global coal reserves, estimated stocks that are actually accessible are slightly less than half of the declared reserves. This is an economic calculation, and takes no account of an underlying factor that will increasingly come to dominate calculations of accessibility of coal reserves (as well as shale oil and some other oil sources). This underlying factor is net energy gain. In other words, if it takes more energy to extract a mineral energy source than is gained from that source, it is not worth extracting it. Economics will eventually be forced into line with the underlying geology, physics and chemistry of mineral energy extraction. Despite claims that there are hundreds of years’ worth of coal in the ground, we may also be rapidly approaching the era of Peak Coal.
The recent interest in the coal deposits in Moatize, Mozambique, should be seen in this context. It seems that China, India and Brazil are all interested, because the quality of the coking coal is high and the size of the deposits is enormous, giving them a global significance. This also has direct implications for South Africa's energy future, especially if it does not gain access to this coal, and if a proposed hydroelectric dam on the Zambezi in Mozambique is not built.
Peak Uranium
The current worldwide plans for construction of new nuclear power stations imply a doubling of capacity for nuclear power generation within a fairly short timescale. No country is seriously planning to generate electricity from nuclear fusion. Plutonium has also been ruled out, although there may be pressure to change that when uranium supply shortages become acute.
Evidently, individual countries have made their plans without reference to others, and it is not at all clear that there is sufficient uranium to supply all of these power plants. Although it has been pointed out in the UK press by the Member of Parliament Michael Meacher that the US is already partly reliant on importing uranium from decommissioned Russian nuclear weapons, no one (in public at least) seems to have taken on board the implications. One estimate is that if all the current plans for new nuclear power stations are implemented, then there is only enough uranium for 20 years worldwide. Since that is less than the design life of many nuclear power stations, this implies a crisis within a fairly short timescale (given the lead times for the construction of such power plants). Will this lead to military as well as economic competition for uranium supplies? It may already have done so in North Africa.
Some argue that nuclear power will help mitigate the effects of declining oil output. This argument is clearly spurious. Nuclear power only provides about 2% of total world electricity production. Doubling capacity as planned only gives us 4%. This is self-evidently only a very small part of any process of substituting other fuels for oil and gas in electricity generation.3 Nuclear cannot substitute at all for oil and gas as a chemical feedstock, although it might conceivably be used in commercial shipping.
Looking at sources of uranium supply, the implications for Africa become clearer. The main sources are in Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan and Russia, but other secondary sources can be found in Sudan, Algeria, Nigeria, Namibia and South Africa. Russian companies have bought shares in Australian and Canadian uranium suppliers, and deals seem to have been struck by Putin in Namibia and South Africa. A Russian deal with Kazakhstan seems to have fallen through, with the Kazakhs preferring instead a little-known UK company. Despite this, the overall picture on uranium has Russia in quite a strong position, especially when it is also selling uranium from decommissioned nuclear warheads. Given that Russia already has some access to uranium from southern Africa, then the North African sources become especially important, most notably to France, a country which derives 80% of its electricity from nuclear power. The UK must also look to these sources, even if it does not increase the proportion of its electricity coming from nuclear power very much. Currently, it is 18%.
Incredibly, there is an alternative form of nuclear power generation that is clean and proven (by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA]) but which has been ignored in nuclear-power policy making. This is thorium, which is for practical purposes self-cleaning, thereby avoiding most of the waste storage and disposal costs associated with uranium. In addition to its other advantages, thorium would allow small-scale decentralised nuclear power generation. Although it was developed some decades ago, this technology has recently been brought to the attention of President Barack Obama, and was also evaluated a few years ago in France. The French nuclear authorities ignored this solution, and there seems to have been no public response from the Obama administration. This leads one to the conclusion that there are fears about the terrorist implications of more widely distributed nuclear material, or that there are vested interests in large-scale power generation and transmission line infrastructure, or that uranium-based nuclear power is really desired as a source of nuclear weapons. It could conceivably be a mix of all three motives, but at present it looks as if thorium is not going to be utilised, except perhaps in spacecraft.
Economic contraction and US dominance
Clearly, unless countries develop sustainable and renewable sources of energy supply, the Russians are hard to avoid. This has implications for those who argue in favour of reducing European dependence on Russian gas, or Central Asian gas transiting through Russia. Such advocates seem blithely unaware of the fact that Russia and Kazakhstan are building gas pipelines to China, and Turkmenistan seems about to follow suit. The Russians are also trying to gain access to gas sources in Africa. This includes Gazprom, one of the biggest companies in the world, bidding to build the proposed gas pipeline from the Gulf of Guinea to Algeria, where it would connect with Algerian pipelines crossing the Mediterranean into Europe.
Economic growth, especially that component of it arising from improved productivity, derives from various sources, but the most potent of them are organic and inorganic sources of non-human energy. Good forms of social organisation are a secondary source of increasing productivity. Since the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859, the main source of economic growth has been oil, which has since the beginning of the twentieth century increasingly replaced coal as the prime energy source. It has also replaced coal as the prime source of chemical feedstock, and hence of new materials.4
The decline in this source of energy, which is evidently very difficult to replace with conventional technology, carries the serious threat of a reversal of the economic growth experienced over the last century or so. Such a reversal of fortunes, whether it is stagnation or economic contraction (or as one commentator has argued, hyperinflationary depression) is very difficult for any political leadership to sell to its own population.
Much of the current world pattern of economic activity will become difficult to sustain as oil output declines. World trade will contract, not only because of reduced activity in many countries, but also because shipping will need to rely less on oil, and this probably entails smaller ships, with possibly a return to sailing ships of some kind in at least part of the shipping sector. The economies of scale of larger container ships may partially disappear and hence shipping costs could rise more than the rising price of oil. At present shipping companies are running on very small profit margins and new shipping capacity is about to come on to the world market, which could be a tipping point into insolvency for some major shipping companies.
In terms of food production, agribusiness depends on oil for fertilisers, pesticides, transport and storage. Canned food may partially replace frozen food and any fresh food that is flown long distances. Genetically modified (GM) food depends on the right fertilisers, although they may reduce the use of pesticides. However, they do not provide a solution to growing food shortages and declining world food stocks because the main reason for such declines is a growing shortage of water in agricultural surplus areas. There is little evidence of research on drought-resistant GM crops.5 In a situation of growing world population, declining food production threatens large-scale famine, with Africa being particularly vulnerable.
It is particularly difficult for the US to acknowledge the problem of potential slowing or reversal of economic growth. It is a major importer of oil, but more important is the role of the US dollar as an international reserve currency, the metric in which international trade deals are calculated. Oil contracts as well as trade in many other goods and services are set in US dollars. This privileged function depends in large part on US control of oil prices. Over the years, there has been a shift away from dominance by the ‘oil majors’ such as ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and Chevron in many oil-producing countries, and they have been replaced by national oil companies, usually state-owned ones. As a result, the US has come to rely on military dominance to ensure its dominant position in oil markets. This was made clear in the 1970s with the Carter Doctrine, which stated that the US would use any means, including if necessary military force, to ensure oil supplies from the Middle East. The reason that the Middle East is so important in this respect is that roughly 60% of world oil reserves are located in a triangle with its apex in Kirkuk in northern Iraq and its base traversing the Gulf from eastern Saudi Arabia to eastern Iran. There are also considerable supplies of natural gas within the same triangle.
Consequently, the response of the US to the imminent oil peak has been to increase military spending. This is because its own growing imports of oil (roughly 60% of US oil consumption) and the growing economic competition from the ‘emerging economies’ have left it economically vulnerable.6 The growing demand for oil, which induces some of the same economic effects as reaching the peak of oil production, results from the fact that the emerging economies need oil for their own industry and agriculture. Furthermore, the increase in world trade (at least prior to the financial crisis that started in 2007) has meant a huge demand for oil to power container ships.
While the US obtains some oil from the Middle East, it mainly imports from Latin America. Military control of the Middle East enables it to maintain a stranglehold on oil flowing to its potential economic competitors, and to maintain its control over world oil markets, sustaining the US dollar in international financial markets. With a decline in world oil output, the role of the US dollar as a reserve currency is increasingly in jeopardy, and several countries have started discussions about its partial replacement.
While US companies have recently obtained the lion's share of oil contracts in Iraq, the ongoing unrest in the Middle East has led to a growing US dependence on African oil sources. Since about 2003 the US has declared Africa to be of major strategic interest, and it is official policy to source 25% of its oil from Africa. This figure has already been reached, more or less, but interest in Africa remains strong partly because Angola is an ongoing source of new oilfields and increasing production, and other smaller fields are being discovered in other countries. Angola looks as if it is about to overtake Nigeria as the largest oil exporter from Africa. The imminent danger of economic contraction means that African oil is of growing importance. This development has been accentuated by the fact that output from traditional Latin American sources of US oil imports, such as Mexico, has been declining rapidly, while other countries such as Venezuela have been striking deals with the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries. The response of the US has been to strengthen military ties with Colombia, Peru, Chile and Paraguay, thereby raising tensions with Venezuela and Argentina, among others. It remains to be seen how much the activities of AFRICOM (Africa Command, established in 2008 by the US Department of Defense) will raise tensions in Africa.
AFRICOM
The establishment of AFRICOM, the United States Africa Command, did not appear out of nowhere. As Jeremy Keenan has shown in The dark Sahara (2009), the conditions for US military intervention in Africa were created, at least in part, by the activities of the so-called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Keenan argues that AQIM is really an entity set up and run by the Algerian government intelligence/security sector, and he provides considerable evidence for his view. The activities of AQIM certainly helped legitimise US intervention in the Sahel and Sahara.
In addition to those developments, the foundation of AFRICOM was the result of several years of prior preparation by the US government, most notably through the discussions that led up to the founding of the Gulf of Guinea Commission in 2006. The process of establishing the Commission took place over a period extending from March 2005 until late 2006. It involved a series of three meetings of 11 countries around the Gulf of Guinea, respectively in Abuja (Nigeria), Accra (Ghana) and Cotonou (Benin), during this period. Other African countries such as Senegal also sent representatives, although the South Africans were notable by their absence. French and UK military representation was also in evidence at these meetings. The official aim of this Commission was to establish an agreement on maritime safety and security in the Gulf of Guinea, but the fact that the US Department of Defense took the initiative in organising these meetings (with the participation of the US State Department in the final one) could be seen as an indication that the main aspect of security concerning the US government was that of oil production and shipments out of Africa. This is not to deny the reality of other aspects of the Commission, including illegal fishing, drug smuggling and piracy, but it is clear that illegal oil bunkering is costing a great deal of money to some African governments, and that it disrupts security of supply of oil exports. With hindsight, one can guess that the willingness of Ministry of Defence and other officials from 11 African countries to sign up to a mutual or joint security agreement was viewed by the US as part of the process of building a consensus for AFRICOM. In that respect, it did not totally succeed, since no African government apart from Liberia has publicly committed itself to hosting AFRICOM. One wonders whether it was hoped that Ghana would do so. That could explain President Obama's visit there, but if that were the objective, it has not worked so far. Nevertheless, as Daniel Volman has shown, there are African governments that are perfectly happy to cooperate in activities initiated by AFRICOM.
There are intrinsic benefits of participation in the Gulf of Guinea Commission for African governments. It is concerned with maritime safety and security, and encourages cooperation among African governments on these issues, with technical support provided by the US (for example on coastguard matters). As a result, it should be easier to detect illegal fishing, smuggling, illegal oil bunkering and environmental damage through improved intergovernmental cooperation and enhanced technical capacity in these areas. In addition, while financial support was not promised during the discussions leading to the Commission being set up, the Gulf of Guinea countries have doubtless been the recipients of financial as well as technical support from the US for maritime purposes.
This helps to explain why some African countries are willing to cooperate also with AFRICOM, despite the general refusal to host its headquarters. No doubt at least some African countries are hoping for similar largesse from AFRICOM, and this has already appeared, at least in the form of training courses and in some cases, arms. The result has been that AFRICOM has been able to run a series of military exercises in Africa, with the participation of various African countries. In addition, in North Africa, there has been a series of actions under the aegis of trans-Saharan security that have been discussed by Jeremy Keenan. As with the Gulf of Guinea Commission, these preceded AFRICOM but have continued after AFRICOM was formally inaugurated. Many of these military exercises have involved African countries with oil reserves, and the Saharan events, which resulted in the inadvertent fomenting of a rebellion by the Tuareg, might be considered as a misguided attempt to secure any future trans-Saharan gas pipeline from the Gulf of Guinea to Algeria. However, these events might also have been motivated by a desire to secure uranium supplies in what is broadly the same area.
Conclusion
The overall picture seems clear. Africa has grown in importance to the US and probably to Europe as a source of oil supplies, in anticipation of the effects of Peak Oil on economic growth. Africa is especially important to the US not only because it imports some 60% of its oil, but also because some of its main suppliers are likely to feel the effects of Peak Oil more rapidly than the world at large. This is especially true of Mexico. Equally important is that fact that US dominance in world oil markets underpins the role of the US dollar as the reserve currency for world trade. Given the enormous overseas debts that the US has run up in recent decades, it is only able to engage in the printing of dollars to sustain these debts because the rest of the world still demands US dollars as a means of payment, as well as for foreign exchange reserves (to cover future payments). In other words, Peak Oil directly threatens the current dominant role of the US in the world economy, and since some 60% of other world resources exist outside the G7 countries, giving the ‘emergent economies’ a strategic advantage for any future economic growth, maintaining control of oil supplies is vital for the future of the US. It is evidently prepared to secure such control by military means. It is to be hoped that this does not lead to major wars, whether in Africa or elsewhere.