Source: UPI
Potentially major oil strikes announced by an American-led consortium and a British company in West Africa have bolstered the region's reputation as the world's hottest energy zone.
It has also become the focus of the U.S. military's global mission to protect America's energy supplies, a development that critics fear will trigger more trouble than it will prevent.
The Texas-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp. said Wednesday its deepwater Venus 1B well off the coast of Sierra Leone had hit paydirt and formed one of two "bookends" 700 miles apart across two prospective basins that extend into waters controlled by Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana.
These could each contain 150 million to 1 billion barrels of oil, according to Anadarko's CEO Al Walker.
One of Anadarko's consortium partners, Tullow Oil of Britain, which has a vast array of licenses in Africa, recently announced a new potentially important discovery in its Ngassa field in Uganda.
By 2025, the United States is expected to be importing about one-fifth of its oil from West Africa. That makes the region strategically important to the United States.
In the scramble for new oil reserves as the planet's older fields become depleted, the U.S. military has become a predominant force in U.S.-African relations.
Witness the 2008 inauguration of the U.S. military's latest command, Africa Command, or Africom, launched a year earlier in February 2007 by the George W. Bush administration, for whom energy security was of paramount importance.
The Bush team insisted that Africom was intended to promote a humanitarian agenda, strengthen democracy in a continent noted for its tyrants and dictators, and improve economic growth. President Barack Obama's administration endorsed that.
But many African see Africom's mission in more menacing terms: ensuring that the United States gets most of Africa's oil, not China or India, which need it to fuel their burgeoning economies.
"While Obama administration officials insist that U.S. policy toward Africa is not being militarized, the evidence seems to suggest otherwise," says Gerald LeMelle, executive director of Africa Action, a non-governmental organization.
