EBOLA AND WEST AFRICA’S OFFSHORE OIL
A New Front in the Proxy Resource Wars
By JC Collins
The movement of troops, especially American troops, is the dead
giveaway to any broader game plan which is intended to be hidden within the
structure of propaganda and media campaigns. So it is with muted surprise
that we hear the news of the United States sending 3,000 troops to help fight
the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
As reported in the New York Times yesterday:
Under pressure to do more to confront the Ebola outbreak sweeping
across West Africa, President Obama on Tuesday is to announce an expansion of
military and medical resources to combat the spread of the deadly virus,
administration officials said.
What isn’t reported in
the article is that 1/3rd of all new oil discoveries have taken place in West
Africa. As reported by Business Day back
in May:
West Africa Region accounts for a third of the world’s new oil discoveries,especially in the Nigeria’s Niger Delta basin and the Gulf of Guinea. According
to the US Geological Survey, the West African Coastal Province has an estimated
3 200 million barrels of oil. Oil exploration off the coast of West Africa has
surged since 2007 when Tullow Oil found the Jubilee field in Ghana, one of the
continent’s biggest recent finds. New finds have been made in Liberia and
Sierra Leone, while Mauritania’s discoveries over the last decade remain to be
replicated. Niger has now become a producer and Mali awaits discovery of
commercial hydrocarbons.
There has also been
a burst of exploration activity in the neighbouring countries of Sierra Leone,
Liberia and Gabon with the hope of finding Jubilee-type giants in the
Cretaceous fan formations and pre-salt structures. In Guinea, Tullow is
undertaking a seismic survey looking at a potential reserve of 10 billion
barrels of oil, and Simba is exploring for oil in Guinea, Ghana, Mali, and
Liberia. Cote d’Ivoire has been through a number of political changes and a
civil war but Lukoil are on the verge of investing about $400-million in
exploration activities in a prospect there.
Considering the resource proxy wars which are taking place in
Eastern Europe and the Middle East, are we to think that the large offshore oil
fields in Western Africa are not subjected to the same proxy strategy?
But it gets even more interesting. From the same Business
Day article:
Now, the attention
is shifting to East Africa. Recent discoveries in Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania
and Uganda have turned the focus on the region. Massive investments have
followed the discoveries in the region too. In 2012, more than 50 exploration
wells were completed in East Africa, which is more than half of conventional
oil and gas resources found worldwide.
And here from a Policy
Paper published in 2012 from the Center for Chinese Studies titled “China’s role in the East African oil and gas sector: a new model
of engagement?” we
learn of how China is actively and strategically setting itself up for control
of the oil and gas in Eastern Africa.
And to add even further
credence to the importance of African resources, here is another publication,
Middle Africa Briefing Note on Energy, this time by Ecobank, the Pan
African Bank, titled “Exploration in West Africa’s Frontier Could Unlock 9 Billion
Barrels in 2014″.
Right out of the gate the policy paper states the following:
Oil and Gas independent companies have spent US$200 million over
the past 4 years acquiring assets in some of West Africa’s less explored
countries, notably, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Sierra Leone
and Liberia.
So lets take a look at a map of the offshore oil discoveries in
West Africa. Here is a map from the USGS:
And here is a map of the Ebola outbreak from the same
region. This map is provided by USAID and the CDC:
You can literally superimpose one map over the other
and conclude that the mobilization of 3000 American troops to West Africa
has more to do with securing the offshore oil resources than it does the Ebola
outbreak.
But like all great plans
and strategies there are multiple moves at work here. There is a very
high probability supported with strong evidence, that the Ebola virus was
manufactured and dispersed intentionally. As covered in the previous post Global Pandemic and Quarantine, the Ebola outbreak is
offering a very convenient pretext for shutting down global equity
markets and invoking a subtle form of martial law across the spectrum of
western and eastern countries. This would obviously facilitate the
transition to the multilateral financial system while offering a reason to the
disorganized masses for the failure of the old and the need for the new.
Any forward action on these fronts well likely be a slow burn as
opposed to fast jumping movements. The economic transition in essence
started back in 2008 and has been progressing as a very slow pace. This
will continue until 2018. The Ebola outbreak, for its part, offers the
same slow burn approach as the economic policy and institutional changes which
are taking place.
There are seldom coincidences of this calibre which take place
on such a global scale. The resource proxy wars continue in Ukraine and
Iraq, and now we can recognize the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa as another
front in the same war.
What will be interesting down the road is what will happen when
the US controlled West African fields and the China controlled East African
fields eventually meet in Middle Africa. What proxy war structure can be
established in the region at that time? Perhaps the North Africa country
of Libya is more strategic than first realized. – JC
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