The long-held suspicions about George Bush's wars are well-placed. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not prompted by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They were not waged to spread democracy in the Middle East or enhance security at home. They were conceived and planned in secret long before September 11, 2001 and they were undertaken to control petroleum resources.
The "global war on terror" began as a fraud and a smokescreen and remains so today, a product of the Bush Administration's deliberate and successful distortion of public perception. The fragmented accounts in the mainstream media reflect this warping of reality, but another more accurate version of recent history is available in contemporary books and the vast information pool of the Internet. When told start to finish, the story becomes clear, the dots easier to connect.
Both appalling and masterful, the lies that led us into war and keep us there today show the people of the Bush Administration to be devious, dangerous and far from stupid.
The following is an in-depth look at the oil wars, the events leading up to them, and the players who made them possible.
On January 26, 1998, the PNAC, sent a letter to President William Clinton urging the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The dictator, the letter alleged, was a destabilizing force in the Middle East, and posed a mortal threat to "...the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's oil supply..." The subjugation of Iraq would be the first application of "pre-emptive war."
The unprovoked, full-scale invasion and occupation of another country, however, would be an unequivocal example of "the use of armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity, or political independence of another state." That is the formal United Nations definition of military aggression, and a nation can choose to launch it only in self-defense. Otherwise it is an international crime.
President Clinton did not honor the PNAC's request.
But sixteen members of the Project for a New American Century would soon assume prominent positions in the Administration of George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage and John Bolton.
The "significant portion of the world's oil supply" was of immediate concern, because of the commanding influence of the oil industry in the Bush Administration. Beside the president and vice president, eight cabinet secretaries and the national security advisor had direct ties to the industry, and so did 32 others in the departments of Defense, State, Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and the Office of Management and Budget.
Within days of taking office, President Bush appointed Vice President Cheney to chair a National Energy Policy Development Group. Cheney's "Energy Task Force" was composed of the relevant federal officials and dozens of energy industry executives and lobbyists, and it operated in tight secrecy. (The full membership has never been revealed, but Enron's Kenneth Lay is known to have participated, and the Washington Post reported that Exxon-Mobil, Conoco, Shell, and BP America did, too.)
During his second week in office, President Bush convened the first meeting of his National Security Council. It was a triumph for the PNAC. In just one hour-long meeting, the new Bush Administration turned upside down the long-standing focus of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Over Secretary of State Colin Powell's objections, the goal of reconciling the Israel-Palestine conflict was abandoned, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was set as the new priority. Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty, describes the meeting in detail.
The Energy Task Force wasted no time, either. Within three weeks of its creation, the group was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory of "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" - dozens of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages of negotiations for exploring and developing Iraqi crude.
Not a single U.S. oil company was among the "suitors," and that was intolerable, given a foreign policy bent on global hegemony. The National Energy Policy document, released May 17, 2001 concluded this: "By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy."
That rather innocuous statement can be clarified by a top-secret memo dated February 3, 2001 to the staff of the National Security Council. Cheney's group, the memo said, was "melding" two apparently unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies toward rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." The memo directed the National Security Council staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as the "melding" continued. National security policy and international energy policy would be developed as a coordinated whole. This would prove convenient on September 11, 2001, still seven months in the future.
The Bush Administration was drawing a bead on Iraqi oil long before the "global war on terror" was invented. But how could the "capture of new and existing oil fields" be made to seem less aggressive, less arbitrary, less overt?
During April of 2002, almost a full year before the invasion, the State Department launched a policy-development initiative called "The Future of Iraq Project" to accomplish this. The "Oil and Energy Working Group" provided the disguise for "capturing" Iraqi oil. Iraq, it said in its final report, "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war ... the country should establish a conducive business environment to attract investment in oil and gas resources."
Capture would take the form of investment, and the vehicle for doing so would be the "production sharing agreement."
Under production sharing agreements, or PSAs, oil companies are granted ownership of a "share" of the oil produced, in exchange for investing in development costs, and the contracts are binding for up to 30 years. What would happen, though, if the companies' investments were only minimal, but their shares of the production were obscenely, disproportionately large?
This is hardwired. According to a UK Platform article titled "Crude Designs," production sharing agreements have now been drafted in Baghdad covering 75 percent of the undeveloped Iraqi fields, and the oil companies, waiting to sign the contracts, will earn as much 162 percent on their investments. And the "foreign suitors" are not quite so foreign now: The players on the inside tracks are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell.
The use of PSAs will cost the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars in just the first few years of the "investment" program. They would be far better off keeping in place the structure Iraq has relied upon since 1972: a nationalized oil industry leasing pumping rights to the oil companies, who then pay royalties to the central government. That is how it is done today in Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC countries.
Production sharing agreements, heavily favored by the oil companies, were specified by George Bush's State Department. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority drafted an oil law privatizing the oil sector, and American oil interests have lobbied in Baghdad ever since then for the PSAs. Apparently successfully: The Oil Committee headed by Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih is said currently to be "leaning" toward them.
With the capture of Iraqi oil resources prospectively disguised, the Halliburton Company was then hired, secretly, to design a fire suppression strategy for the Iraqi oil fields. If oil wells were to be torched during the upcoming war (as Saddam did in Kuwait in 1991), the Bush Administration would be prepared to extinguish them rapidly. The contract with Halliburton was signed in the fall of 2002. Congress had yet to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
So a line of dots begins to point at Iraq, though nothing illegal or unconstitutional has yet taken place. We are still in the policy-formulation stage, but two "seemingly unrelated areas of policy" - national security policy and international energy policy - have become indistinguishable.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the first western oil company to take action in the Basin was the Bridas Corporation of Argentina. It acquired production leases and exploration contracts in the region, and by November of 1996 had signed an agreement with General Dostum of the Northern Alliance and with the Taliban to build a pipeline across Afghanistan.
Not to be outdone, the American company Unocal (aided by an Arabian company, Delta Oil) fought Bridas at every turn. Unocal wanted exclusive control of the trans-Afghan pipeline and hired a number of consultants in its conflict with Bridas: Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage (now Deputy Secretary of State in the Bush Administration), Zalmay Khalilzad (a signer of the PNAC letter to President Clinton) and Hamid Karzai.
Unocal wooed Taliban leaders at its headquarters in Texas, and hosted them in meetings with federal officials in Washington, D.C.
Unocal and the Clinton Administration hoped to have the Taliban cancel the Bridas contract, but were getting nowhere. Finally, Mr. John J. Maresca, a Unocal Vice President, testified to a House Committee of International Relations on February 12, 1998, asking politely to have the Taliban removed and a stable government inserted. His discomfort was well placed.
Six months later terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and two weeks after that President Clinton launched a cruise missile attack into Afghanistan. Clinton issued an executive order on July 4, 1999, freezing the Taliban's U.S.-held assets and prohibiting further trade transactions with the Taliban.
Mr. Maresca could count that as progress. More would follow.
Immediately upon taking office, the new Bush Administration actively took up negotiating with the Taliban once more, seeking still to have the Bridas contract vacated, in exchange for a tidy package of foreign aid. The parties met three times, in Washington, Berlin, and Islamablad, but the Taliban wouldn't budge.
Behind the negotiations, however, planning was underway to take military action if necessary. In the spring of 2001 the State Department sought and gained concurrence from both India and Pakistan to do so, and in July of 2001, American officials met with Pakistani and Russian intelligence agents to inform them of planned military strikes against Afghanistan the following October. A British newspaper told of the U.S. threatening both the Taliban and Osama bin Laden - two months before 9/11 - with military strikes.
According to an article in the UK Guardian, State Department official Christina Rocca told the Taliban at their last pipeline negotiation in August of 2001, just five weeks before 9/11, "Accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs."
The players have changed as national supremacy has changed, as oil companies have morphed over time, and as powerful men have lived out their destinies.
Among the major players today are the Royal family of Saudi Arabia and the Bush family of the state of Maine (more recently of Texas). And they are closely and intimately related. The relationship goes back several generations, but it was particularly poignant in the first Gulf War in 1990-91, when the U.S. and British armed forces stopped Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, before his drive reached the Arabian oil fields. Prime Minister John Major of the UK, and President George H.W. Bush became the much esteemed champions of the Arabian monarchy, and James Baker, Bush's Secretary of State, was well regarded, too. (Years earlier, Mr. Baker and a friend of the royal family's had been business partners, in building a skyscraper bank building in Houston.)
Carlyle, with its headquarters just six blocks from the White House, invests heavily in all the industries involved in the Great Game: the defense, security, and energy industries, and it profits enormously from the Afghan and Iraqi wars.
In the late 1980s, Carlyle's personal networking brought together George W. Bush, the future 43rd U.S. president, and $50,000 of financial backing for his Texas oil company, Arbusto Energy. The investor was Salem bin Laden (half-brother of Osama bin Laden) who managed the Carlyle investments of the Saudi bin Laden Group. (After the tragedy of 9/11, by mutual consent, the bin Laden family and Carlyle terminated their business dealings.) George Bush left Carlyle in 1992 to run for governor of Texas.
Ex-President Bush, Ex-Prime Minister Major, and Ex Secretary Baker, in the 1990's, were Carlyle's advance team, scouring the world for profitable investments and investors. In Saudi Arabia they met with the royal family, and with the two wealthiest, non-royal families - the bin Ladens and the bin Mahfouzes.
Khalid bin Mahfouz was prominent in Delta Oil, Unocal's associate in the Afghan pipeline conflict. He was later accused of financing al Qaeda, and named in a trillion dollar lawsuit brought by the families of 9/11 victims. (It was Mr. bin Mahfouz who had been Mr. Baker's business associate in Houston.)
Carlyle retained James Baker's Houston law firm, Baker-Botts, and Baker himself served as Carlyle Senior Counselor from 1993 until 2005. (Other clients of Baker-Botts: Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, Shell, Amoco, Conoco-Phillips, Halliburton, and Enron.)
Mr. Baker has long been willing to put foremost the financial advantage of himself, his firm, and his friends, often at the expense of patriotism and public service. As President Reagan's Secretary of the Treasury, he presided over the savings-and-loan scandal, in which S&L executives like Charles Keating and the current President's brother Neil Bush handed the American taxpayers a bill to pay, over a 40-year period, of $1.2 trillion. His law firm willingly took on the defense of Prince Sultan bin Abdul Azis, the Saudi Defense Minister sued by the families of 9/11 victims for complicity in the attacks.
We will encounter Mr. Baker again soon.
President Bush formally established the PNAC's prescription for pre-emptive, premeditated war as U.S. policy when he signed a document entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" early in his first term.
Still nothing illegal or unconstitutional had been done.
But the rationale and the planning for attacking both Afghanistan and Iraq were in place. The preparations had all been done secretly, wholly within the executive branch. The Congress was not informed until the endgame, when President Bush, making his dishonest case for the "war on terror" asked for and was granted the discretion to use military force. The American people were equally uninformed and misled. Probably never before in our history was such a drastic and momentous action undertaken with so little public knowledge or Congressional oversight: the dispatch of America's armed forces into four years of violence, at horrendous costs in life and treasure.
Then a catastrophic event took place. A hijacked airliner probably en route to the White House crashes in Pennsylvania, the Pentagon was afire, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were rubble.
In the first hours of frenetic response, fully aware of al Qaeda's culpability, both President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld sought frantically to link Saddam Hussein to the attacks, as we know from Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies. They anxiously waited to proceed with their planned invasion of Iraq.
If the Bush Administration needed a reason to proceed with their invasions, they could not have been handed a more fortuitous and spectacular excuse, and they played their hand brilliantly.
9/11 was a shocking event of unprecedented scale, but it was simply not an invasion of national security. It was a localized criminal act of terrorism, and to compare it, as the Bush Administration immediately did, to Pearl Harbor was ludicrous: The hijacked airliners were not the vanguard of a formidable naval armada, an air force, and a standing army ready to engage in all out war, as the Japanese were prepared to do and did in 1941.
By equating a criminal act of terrorism with a military threat of invasion, the Bush Administration consciously adopted fear mongering as a mode of governance. It was an extreme violation of the public trust, but it served perfectly their need to justify warfare.
As not a few disinterested observers noted at the time, international criminal terrorism is best countered by international police action, which Israel and other nations have proven many times over to be effective. Military mobilization is irrelevant. It has proven to be counterproductive.
Why, then, was a "war" declared on "terrorists and states that harbor terrorists?"
The pre-planned attack on Afghanistan, as we have seen, was meant to nullify the contract between the Taliban and the Bridas Corporation. It was a matter of international energy policy. It had nothing to do, as designed, with apprehending Osama bin Laden - a matter of security policy.
But the two "seemingly unrelated areas of policy" had been "melded," so here was an epic opportunity to bait-and-switch. Conjoining the terrorists and the states that harbored them made "war" plausible, and the Global War on Terror was born: It would be necessary to overthrow the Taliban as well as to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.
(In retrospect, the monumental fraud of the "war on terror" is crystal clear. In Afghanistan the Taliban was overthrown instead of bringing the terrorist Osama bin Laden to justice, and in Iraq there were no terrorists at all. But Afghanistan and Iraq are dotted today with permanent military bases guarding the seized petroleum assets.)
On October 7, 2001 the carpet of bombs is unleashed over Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai, the former Unocal consultant, is installed as head of an interim government. Subsequently he is elected President of Afghanistan, and welcomes the first U.S. envoy - Mr. John J. Maresca, the Vice President of the Unocal Corporation who had implored Congress to have the Taliban overthrown. Mr. Maresca was succeeded by Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad - also a former Unocal consultant. (Mr. Khalilzad has since become Ambassador to Iraq, and has now been nominated to replace John Bolton, his PNAC colleague, as the ambassador to the UN.)
With the Taliban banished and the Bridas contract moot, Presidents Karzai of Afghanistan and Musharraf of Pakistan meet on February 8, 2002, sign an agreement for a new pipeline, and the way forward is open for Unocal/Delta once more.
The Bridas contract was breached by U.S. military force, but behind the combat was Unocal. Bridas sued Unocal in the U.S. courts for contract interference and won, overcoming Richard Ben Veniste's law firm in 2004. That firm had multibillion-dollar interests in the Caspian Basin and shared an office in Uzbekistan with the Enron Corporation. In 2004, Mr. Ben Veniste was serving as a 9/11 Commissioner.
About a year after the Karzai/Musharraf agreement was signed, an article in the trade journal "Alexander's Gas and Oil Connections" described the readiness of three US federal agencies to finance the prospective pipeline: the U.S. Export/Import Bank, the Trade and Development Agency, and the Overseas Private Insurance Corporation. The article continued, "...some recent reports ... indicated ... the United States was willing to police the pipeline infrastructure through permanent stationing of its troops in the region." The article appeared on February 23, 2003.
The objective of the first premeditated war was now achieved. The Bush Administration stood ready with financing to build the pipeline across Afghanistan, and with a permanent military presence to protect it.
Within two months President Bush sent the armed might of America sweeping into Iraq.
Then came the smokescreen of carefully crafted deceptions. The staging of the Jessica Lynch rescue. The toppling of the statue in Baghdad. Mission accomplished. The orchestrated capture, kangaroo court trial, and hurried execution of Saddam Hussein. Nascent "democracy" in Iraq. All were scripted to burnish the image of George Bush's fraudulent war.
The smokescreen includes the cover-up of 9/11. Initially and fiercely resisting any inquiry at all, President Bush finally appoints a 10-person "9/11 Commission."
The breathtaking exemptions accorded President Bush and Vice President Cheney in the inquiry rendered the entire enterprise a farce: They were "interviewed" together, no transcription of the conversation was allowed, and they were not under oath. The Commission report finally places the blame on "faulty intelligence."
Many of the 10 commissioners, moreover, were burdened with stunning conflicts of interest - Mr. Ben Veniste, for example - mostly by their connections to the oil and defense industries. The Carlyle Group contributed to Commissioner Tim Roemer's political campaigns. Commission Chairman Thomas Kean was a Director of Amerada Hess, which had formed a partnership with Delta Oil, the Arabian company of Khalid bin Mahfouz, and that company was teamed with Unocal in the Afghan pipeline project. Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton serves on the board of Stonebridge International consulting group, which is advising Gulfsands Petroleum and Devon Energy Corporation about Iraqi oil opportunities.
The apparent manipulation of pre-war intelligence is not addressed by the 9/11 Commission, the veracity of the Administration's lies and distortions is assumed without question, and the troubling incongruities of 9/11 are ignored: The theories of controlled demolition, the prior short-selling of airline stock, the whole cottage industry of skepticism.
The doubters and critics of 9/11 are often dismissed as conspiracy crazies, but you needn't claim conspiracy to be skeptical. Why did both President Bush and Vice President Cheney pressure Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to forego any investigation at all? Failing in that, why did the President then use "Executive Privilege" so often to withhold and censor documents? Why did the White House refuse to testify under oath? Why the insistence on the loopy and unrecorded Oval Office interview of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney simultaneously?
There is much we don't know about 9/11.
The Commission assessed the situation as "grave and deteriorating" and recommended substantive changes in handling it: draw down the troop levels and negotiate with Syria and Iran. These recommendations were rejected out of hand by the Bush Administration, but those about the oil sector could hardly have been more pleasing.
The Commission's report urged Iraqi leaders to "... reorganize the national industry as a commercial enterprise." That sounds like code for privatizing the industry (which had been nationalized in 1972.) In case that wasn't clear enough, the Commission encouraged "... investment in Iraq's oil sector by the international energy companies." That sounds like code for Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, Conoco/Phillips, BP/Amoco and Royal Dutch Shell. The Commission urged support for the World Bank's efforts to "ensure that best practices are used in contracting." And that sounds like code for Production Sharing Agreements.
Mr. Baker is a clever and relentless man. He will endorse pages and pages of changes in strategy and tactics - but leave firmly in place the one inviolable purpose of the conflict in Iraq: capturing the oil.
The evidence suggests the contrary.
As recently as January of 2005, the Associated Press expected construction of the Trans Afghan Pipeline to begin in 2006. So did News Central Asia. But by October of 2006, NCA was talking about construction "... as soon as there is stability in Afghanistan."
As the Taliban, the warlords, and the poppy growers reclaim control of the country, clearly there is no stability in Afghanistan, and none can be expected soon.
Unocal has been bought up by the Chevron Corporation. The Bridas Corporation is now part of BP/Amoco. Searching the companies' websites for "Afghanistan pipeline" yields, in both cases, zero results. Nothing is to be found on the sites of the prospective funding agencies. The pipeline project appears to be dead.
The Production Sharing Agreements for Iraq's oil fields cannot be signed until the country's oil policies are codified in statute. That was supposed to be done by December of 2006, but Iraq is in a state of chaotic violence. The "hydrocarbon law" is struggling along - one report suggests it may be in place by March - so the signing of the PSA's will be delayed at least that long.
The U.S. and British companies that stand to gain so much - Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, Concoco/Phillips, BP/Amoco and Royal Dutch Shell - will stand a while longer. They may well have to stand down.
On October 31, 2006 the newspaper China Daily reported on the visit to China by Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani. Mr. Shahristani, the story said, "welcomed Chinese oil companies to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi oil industry." That was alarming, but understated.
Stratfor, the American investment research service, was more directly to the point, in a report dated September 27, 2006 (a month before Minister Shahristani's visit, so it used the future tense). The Minister "... will talk to the Chinese about honoring contracts from the Saddam Hussein era.... This announcement could change the face of energy development in the country and leave U.S. firms completely out in the cold."
The oil wars are abject failures. The Project for a New American Century wanted, in a fantasy of retrograde imperialism, to remove Saddam Hussein from power. President George Bush launched an overt act of military aggression to do so, at a cost of more than 3,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and half a trillion dollars. In the process he has exacerbated the threats from international terrorism, ravaged the Iraqi culture, ruined their economy and their public services, sent thousands of Iraqis fleeing their country as refugees, created a maelstrom of sectarian violence, dangerously destabilized the Middle East, demolished the global prestige of the United States, and defamed the American people.
--------
Richard W. Behan lives and writes on Lopez Island, off the northwest coast of Washington state. He is working on a new book, To Provide Against Invasions: Corporate Dominion and America's Derelict Democracy. He can be reached at rwbehan@rockisland.com.
Listen: Oil and Gas Mamma - What About the Children
You'll need Real Player to listen and please allow up to 30 seconds for music to load. You can download Free Real Player by clicking on the icon above.
back to table of contents
Shell has halted plans to build a liquefied natural gas terminal that spawned controversy over the environmental impact of technology that would have been used at the port.
Greg Koehler, project director for Shell's Gulf Landing, said the decision to stop the project, which had been licensed and was in early stages of development, was driven by the market.
"The (nation's) regasification capacity is adequate to handle everything coming into the U.S.," Koehler said Wednesday. Koehler cited several onshore LNG terminals that are either built or under construction in Texas and Louisiana, as well as an offshore port in Mexico.
Koehler notified the Coast Guard of its decision on Tuesday, he said.
Gulf Landing, which was to be built 38 miles south of Cameron Parish, joins four other offshore open-loop LNG projects proposed for the Gulf of Mexico that have been pulled off the drawing board by companies for various reasons. Only one remaining open-loop port is still being proposed off Alabama's coast. That port has not been licensed.
Decision welcomed
Environmentalists and conservationists cheered Shell's decision.
"It's good for the fish, and it's good for the fisherman," said Jeff Angers of the Coastal Conservation Association.
The CCA, along with the Gulf Restoration Network, the Sierra Club and the Louisiana Charter Boat Association, had been fighting plans for so-called "open loop" LNG ports that would use billions of gallons of seawater to warm the supercooled gas that is brought to the United States on tankers.
The groups have said the technology would hurt Gulf fisheries.
"This was the news we were hoping for. Shell did the responsible thing," said Aaron Viles of the Gulf Restoration Network.
Last year, Gov. Kathleen Blanco vetoed an open-loop port proposed by McMoran Exploration off Louisiana's coast because, she said, too little was known about the impact it would have on fisheries.
McMoran revised the project to use gas, rather than seawater, to warm the gas.
Blanco, though, allowed the Shell project before fisheries scientists and environmentalists raised public awareness of the possible impacts of the open-loop system. While the Maritime Administration issues the licenses, governors affected by the port have the option to veto such offshore ports.
A second port still on the drawing board, TORP Technology's Bienville Offshore Energy Terminal, proposes using an open-loop system with modifications. But Alabama Gov. Bob Riley has already voiced opposition to using the open loop technology and threatened to veto other companies plans for open-loop terminals.
"This decision shines a single bright light on the only applicant pursuing open loop," Angers said.
Since Shell US Gas & Power LLC received its license in 2005, environmental groups have tried various tactics to stop Shell's plans, from filing a lawsuit in federal court to flying airplane banners at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival to going to The Hague to appear at a board meeting of Royal Dutch Shell to protest the plans.
Koehler said such outside pressures did not affect Shell's decision. He said they had worked diligently with several groups, including the CCA, to study and limit any impacts on the Gulf fisheries.
"It's kind of how capital markets work," he said.
Bill Cooper, executive director for the Center for LNG, an LNG trade group, agreed.
"We're in this period of natural fallout of proposals and applications to the actual number that's needed," he said. "It's been said since day one that the markets will determine which (terminals) will get built."
Demand for LNG
There has been a rush to get LNG terminals licensed as the growing demand for natural gas is predicted to outstrip by 21 percent the country's ability to supply itself by 2030, Cooper said.
David Dismukes with Louisiana State University's Center for Energy Studies said that a lot of projects won't get built because of the tremendous cost of such projects, which can be in excess of $3 billion.
"You know that not all of those projects are going to be built. There's a lot of testing of the market," he said.
Koehler said Shell still believes that there is a need to provide LNG, but the company has other avenues to provide the liquefied gas with rights at terminals being built in Maryland and Georgia.
"We're very bullish on LNG. We see it as a growing market and want to be part of that market," he said.
. . . . . . .
Pam Radtke Russell can be reached at prussell@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3351.
back to table of contents
New Orleans, LA - May 15, 2005 - Today Sierra Club, the Gulf Restoration Network, and the Louisiana Charter Boat Association petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to overturn a decision by the U.S. Department of Transportation permitting a natural gas facility in the Gulf of Mexico despite its potentially severe impacts to critical Louisiana fisheries, including redfish, shrimp, crabs, and other species. The facility processes imported Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), which is shipped to the U.S. in a -260°F liquefied form, needs to be warmed to be “re-gasified,” and then delivered to the existing gas pipeline infrastructure.
Gulf Landing is one of the seven facilities proposed for the western Gulf of Mexico designed to use an open-rack vaporizer, or open-loop system, running Gulf seawater through radiator-like racks. One terminal alone could use up to 200 million gallons of Gulf water a day to “re-gasify” the imported natural gas. The drastic temperature change, physical damage caused by the process, and injected anti-biofouling chemicals will destroy zooplankton, eggs, and larva by the billions.
The groups filed a Petition for Review in federal court because the Department of Transportation’s environmental analysis failed to examine cumulative impacts to fisheries that may result from the seven facilities.
“The permitting of Gulf Landing defies common sense,” said Aaron Viles, Fisheries Campaign Director with the Gulf Restoration Network. “There is complete agreement among fisheries managers that these facilities will destroy marine wildlife, the only question is to what extent.”
Charlie Smith, Director of the Louisiana Charter Boat Association, which represents charter boat captains and guides across Southern Louisiana, asked, “Why is it that a sports fisherman can face jail time and a fine of $500 per fish for possessing redfish in federal waters, but Shell has approval to kill every redfish egg and larvae that enters its open-loop system? My charter boat captains would really like to know.”
“This is a classic case of federal scientists, who actually know the resource, being rolled by a bureaucrat in Washington following the directives of the Bush Administration’s energy plan,” said Larry Fahn, the National President of the Sierra Club.
“The Department of Transportation’s environmental analysis and permit decision fail to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act and the Deepwater Port Act,” said Karla Raettig, Deputy Director for the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, which represents the organizations. “The law is clear—the agency must examine the cumulative impacts to the environmental, including fisheries, before issuing a permit.”
Contact:
back to table of contents
|
|
The group is targeting Shell Corporation because it recently received a permit to operate an open-loop LNG terminal 38 miles off Louisiana’s Cameron Parish coast. The facility could destroy as much as the equivalent of 3.8 percent of Louisiana’s annual redfish catch and could have unknown but severe impacts on shrimp, crabs, and other important fisheries.
Larry Fahn, the National President of the Sierra Club, came to New Orleans to announce the Sierra Club’s national support of the Gumbo Alliance’s boycott of Shell Corporation. Said Fahn, “Shell can afford to do this the right way. It is coming out of its most profitable year in history, during which it racked up $1.8 million dollars an hour in profit. Shell can’t afford to use 1.6% of its imported natural gas to protect the Gulf’s fish?”
A. J. Fabre, President of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, pointed out, “Off-shore LNG terminals don’t have to be a bad thing. We would all like more affordable energy. But Shell and the other corporations seeking to operate off-shore LNG terminals are all ignoring the practical alternative of closed-loop technology. LNG in the Gulf must be closed-loop.”
Mike Lane, Publisher of the sportsman website RodNReel.com, has been active in the campaign from the start. “My website has helped generate over 2,000 responses to Shell from concerned sportsmen – they all want to know the same thing: Why is it that a sports fisherman can face jail time and a fine of $500 per fish for possessing redfish in federal waters, but Shell has approval to kill every redfish egg and larvae that enters its open-loop system? It defies common-sense.”
The originator of the effort to boycott Shell, Charlie Smith, the Director of the Louisiana Charter Boat Association, added, “Some people cringe at the idea of a boycott, but the boycott was a vital first step in the creation of America. This is our updated version of the Boston Tea Party. We’re not against Shell Oil, we’re against the open loop LNG process and the damage that fisheries managers agree it will do to our fishery. When Shell changes to the safer alternative, we’ll quit. Until then, we’re going to fight.”
The groups have targeted Shell due in part to its history in Louisiana. Aaron Viles of the Gulf Restoration Network pointed out that “from Shell’s pollution of Bayou Trepagnier to its treatment of the Diamond community just across the fence line from its Norco refinery, Shell’s track record hasn’t been impressive. A few years ago we sat down with Shell in a formal stakeholder process to clear the air and hear Shell’s plans to turn over a new leaf. Well, besides the money Shell has donated to the America’s Wetland campaign, it seems to be the same-old Shell: profit first, sustainability a distant second.”
At the conclusion of the press conference, the groups unfurled a scroll of over 2,000 petition signatures demanding that Shell Gas and Power Corporation abandon its plans to develop an open-loop LNG terminal.
The drastic temperature change and physical damage caused by the process will destroy fish eggs and larva by the billions.
Because the open-loop LNG facilities are proposed for areas that are considered essential fish habitat for a vast range of Gulf sea life, fisheries managers from the National Marine Fisheries Services, the Gulf States Marine Fish Commission, and the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council are unified in their opposition to the use of the open-loop system due to the potentially significant cumulative impacts these facilities could have on critical fisheries such as red fish, shrimp, crabs, and others.
reprinted from: Gulf Restoration Network
back to table of contents
Save Louisiana Wetlands Inc. and Save Our Wetlands Inc. (SOWL) joined the fight to stop and expose Shell Oil Companies
proposed LNG Plant that will significantly destroy the fisheries of the Gulf of Mexico. On Saturday morning May 30th 2005
Save Our Wetlands along with a representative of the Sierra Club and the Green Party protested by displaying the following
sign at the Mayor Ray Nagin’s environmental breakfast.
Nagin, who is a corporate mouthpiece for Wal-Mart and other corporate privateers, presented an environmental award to Shell Oil Company. Shell Oil Company donated monies to a small recycling center called the Green Project located off St. Claude Ave. down by the railroad tracks.
Nagin is notorious for tearing down public housing to make way for Lester Kabencoff’s corporate development expansion plans. Nagin presently has plans to displace the poor Afro-Americans living in the Iberville public housing project to make way for another Lester Kabencoff private corporate development scheme, similar to the displacement of the poor Afro-Americans that were once living in the public housing St. Thomas projects now Wal-Mart. The old Krauss building adjacent to the Iberville public housing project on North Rampart St. is presently being yuppiefied into swank condominiums.
In the meantime, New Orleans under Nagin acquires no new public parks. Under his administration, the municipal public parks that do exist in New Orleans are permitted to deteriorate. The rich are able to use the facilities of their private institutions. The poor swelter in their poverty cesspools while being arrested shot and harassed by Nagin's New Orleans police department. His solutions to the New Orleans poverty problem is to displace the poor out of New Orleans centralized public housing, and move them to New Orleans East.
He recently joined hands with City Councilman "Fast Eddie" Sapir to attempt to privatize the New Orleans Sewage and Water Board, and put New Orleans water into the pockets of mega-international corporations.
He has single handedly destroyed the unique and distinct character of the historic Vieux Carre (French Quarter) of New Orleans by placing hundreds of trash cans, bearing corporate logos, on the streets of New Orleans. Nagin has recently, in violation of public bid laws and without approval of the Vieux Carre Commission placed hundreds of illegal parking meter structures in the historic French Quarter of New Orleans.
He is standing quietly to the side while attempts are being made to privatize New Orleans Charity hospital. He is fighting hard for the rich and elitist. Under his administration the public school system is being dismantled. The New Orleans public school system is divided between rich-elitist-private versus poor-black public. It will only be a question of time before New Orleans public schools will be funded by corporations such as Coca- Cola, McDonald’s, Shell Oil Company, or some other mega-corporation.
Mayor Ray Nagin does not represent the hundreds of thousands of poor Afro-Americans residing in New Orleans. He stands idle while antiquated drug laws and poverty are causing hundreds and hundreds of shootings and the deaths of young Afro-Americans. Under his administration the rich get richer. The poor get poorer. And Shell Oil Company is given an environmental award at Mayor Ray Nagin’s environmental breakfast on May 30th 2005.
back to table of contents
- John Hofmeister, President, Shell Oil Company
It's unbelievable that Mr. Hofmeister has the audacity to even spew such outlandish rhetoric...but there it is...now here's the TRUTH:
Shell Oil Company according to EPA documents, is one of the major polluters in the United States. In the past, Shell's Norco, Louisiana plant has had multiple explosions, resulting in massive evacuations of minority Afro-American citizens, that live in this toxic-petro-chemical corridor called: "Cancer Alley." Louisiana is a toxic dump thanks to Shell Oil and the gas industry.
Ironically, the toxic polluter, Shell Oil is now a major sponsor of AMERICA WETLANDS and is putting up several million dollars for a AMERICA WETLANDS PR campaign touting to rebrand Louisiana's marshes as "America's Wetland."
The Marmillion Company a big Washington D.C. public relations firm, who has had ties with Sen. Mary Landrieu in the past, has now been contracted to handle the public relations for AMERICA WETLANDS.
On thier website Marmillion Company boasts of its past involvement with Landrieu, acting as her PR campaign management when she has run for political office. Also, conviently enough, Marmillion Company announced that at the beginning of 2006 Landrieu's Chief of Staff Norma Jane Sabiston will take over as their new Vice President.
Landrieu, who is known for pushing to drill in the Artic National Wildlife Reserve(ANWR), for giving tax breaks to the oil & gas industry, and supporting 'limitation of liability legislation' for the nuclear power industry is also a spokesperson for AMERICA WETLANDS.
The idea of Landrieu recieving funding from congress for coastal restoration makes one wonder if her interests to preserve wetlands is for the people and wildlife of Louisiana, or is it for the benefit of Shell Oil and the rest of the oil industry.
Now, AMERICA WETLANDS with it's mega-industry sponsor, and it's mega-politically connected spindoctors is convienently omitting key issues from its rhetoric. Such as...
Since AMERICA WETLANDS fails to bring up the known fact that oil company canals are in large part the leading cause of coastal erosion. And since AMERICA WETLANDS has this partnership-sponsorship with Shell Oil that supports this false image of Shell Oil as a wetland-conservation supporter it lends credence to the idea that AMERICA WETLANDS is a straw man created to take the heat off of Shell Oil by ignoring key issues.
By aligning itself and accepting sponsorship from Shell Oil Co. AMERICA WETLANDS helps promote the concealment of the fact that there is an obvious and immediate necessity to convert from the stinking-polluting oil and gas industry to a solar-wind-alternative-economically viable energy industry with a massive energy conservation program.
In recent months state residents have watched as Mr. Bill, the animated clay character famous for his 1970s appearances on the comedy show, lent a hand to ads for the America's Wetland campaign.
But now Mr. Bill's creator, Walter Williams, is yanking his character from the campaign, saying he believes it is selling out to big oil companies — the very people accused of having a hand in destroying wetlands in the first place.
Williams said Shell Oil Co. is using the campaign — to which the company donated $800,000 — as a public relations move to masquerade as a green-friendly business. The last straw, he said, came when TV spots featuring Mr. Bill showed up in Shell-sponsored kiosks at tourist centers throughout Louisiana.
"If they had taken the Shell stickers and logos off that would have been fine," Williams said.
Darci Sinclair, a Shell spokeswoman, said in a statement that the company respects Williams' "right to remove his property from the America's Wetland educational kiosks" and that Shell will "continue its strong partnership" with the wetland campaign.
The campaign was kicked off two years ago by former Gov. Mike Foster to sell Americans on the idea that Louisiana's wetlands need billions of dollars in federal help.
Levees, canals, and oil and gas exploration have been blamed for causing Louisiana to lose 1,900 square miles of wetlands — roughly the area of Delaware — since the 1930s. Advocates say another 700 square miles could disappear unless something is done.
The campaign and its slogan — "America's Wetland: Keep It Alive!" — have taken on a host of sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Tabasco and ConocoPhillips. Public and private money has paid for documentary, brochures, TV spots and bracelets.
Even though Mr. Bill is pulling out, Williams said the campaign can still use previously produced ads as public service announcements on TV and as educational tools.