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2 Russia is far from oil's
peak By F William Engdahl
the 2003 Iraq war that the Russian
geophysicists might be on to something of profound
strategic importance.
If Russia had the
scientific know-how and Western geology did not,
Russia possessed a strategic trump card of
staggering geopolitical import. It was not
surprising that Washington would go about erecting
a "wall of steel" - a network of military bases
and anti-missile shields around Russia to cut its
pipeline and port
links to
western Europe, China and the rest of Eurasia.
English geographer and geopolitician
Halford Mackinder's worst nightmare - a
cooperative convergence of mutual interests of the
major states of Eurasia, born of necessity and
need for oil to fuel economic growth - was
emerging. Ironically, it was the blatant US grab
for the vast oil riches of Iraq and, potentially,
of Iran that catalyzed closer cooperation between
traditional Eurasian foes, China and Russia, and a
growing realization in western Europe that their
options too were narrowing.
The peak
king Peak Oil theory is based on a 1956
paper by the late Marion King Hubbert, a Texas
geologist working for Shell Oil. He argued that
oil wells produced in a bell-curve manner, and
once their "peak" was hit, inevitable decline
followed. He predicted that US oil production
would peak in 1970. A modest man, he named the
production curve he invented Hubbert's Curve, and
the peak as Hubbert's Peak. When US oil output
began to decline in about 1970, Hubbert gained a
certain fame.
The only problem was, it
peaked not because of resource depletion in the US
fields. It "peaked" because Shell, Mobil, Texaco
and the other partners of Saudi Aramco were
flooding the US market with dirt-cheap imports
from the Middle East, tariff-free, at prices so
low California and many Texas domestic producers
could not compete and were forced to shut their
wells.
Vietnam success While
the US oil multinationals were busy controlling
the easily accessible large fields of Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas of cheap,
abundant oil during the 1960s, the Russians were
busy testing their alternative theory. They began
drilling in a supposedly barren region of Siberia.
There they developed 11 major oilfields and one
giant field based on their deep abiotic geological
estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement
rock and hit black gold of a scale comparable to
the Alaska North Slope.
They then went to
Vietnam in the 1980s and offered to finance
drilling costs to show that their new geological
theory worked. Russian company Petrosov drilled in
Vietnam's White Tiger oilfield offshore into
basalt rock some 5,000 meters down and extracted
6,000 barrels a day of oil to feed the
energy-starved Vietnam economy. In the USSR,
abiotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their
knowledge and the Soviet Union emerged as the
world's largest oil producer by the mid-1980s. Few
in the West understood why, or bothered to ask.
Dr J F Kenney is one of the only Western
geophysicists who has taught and worked in Russia,
studying under Vladilen Krayushkin, who developed
the huge Dnieper-Donets Basin. Kenney told me in a
recent interview that "alone to have produced the
amount of oil to date that [Saudi Arabia's] Ghawar
field has produced would have required a cube of
fossilized dinosaur detritus, assuming 100%
conversion efficiency, measuring 19 miles [30.5
kilometers] deep, wide and high." In short, an
absurdity.
Western geologists do not
bother to offer hard scientific proof of fossil
origins. They merely assert their belief as a holy
truth. The Russians have produced volumes of
scientific papers, most in Russian. The dominant
Western journals have no interest in publishing
such a revolutionary view. Careers, entire
academic professions are at stake, after all.
Closing the door The 2003 arrest
of Russian Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil,
took place just before he could sell a dominant
stake in Yukos to ExxonMobil after a private
meeting with Cheney. Had Exxon gotten the stake,
it would have had control of the world's largest
resource of geologists and engineers trained in
the abiotic techniques of deep drilling.
Since 2003, Russian scientific sharing of
knowledge has markedly lessened. Offers in the
early 1990s to share knowledge with US and other
oil geophysicists were met with cold rejection,
according to American geophysicists involved.
Why then the high-risk war to control
Iraq? For a century, US and allied Western oil
giants have controlled world oil via control of
Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Nigeria. Today, as many
giant fields are declining, the companies see the
state-controlled oilfields of Iraq and Iran as the
largest remaining base of cheap, easy oil.
With the huge demand for oil from China
and now India, it becomes a geopolitical
imperative for the United States to take direct
military control of those Middle East reserves as
fast as possible. Cheney came to the job of vice
president from Halliburton Corp, the world's
largest oil-geophysical-services company. The only
potential threat to that US control of oil just
happens to lie inside Russia and with the
now-state-controlled Russian energy giants.
According to Kenney, Russian geophysicists
used the theories of brilliant German scientist
Alfred Wegener fully 30 years before Western
geologists "discovered" Wegener in the 1960s. In
1915, Wegener published the seminal text The
Origin of Continents and Oceans, which
suggested an original unified landmass or Pangaea
more than 200 million years ago that separated
into present continents by what he called
continental drift.
Up to the 1960s,
supposed US scientists such as Dr Frank Press, the
White House science adviser, referred to Wegener
as "lunatic". Geologists at the end of the 1960s
were forced to eat their words as Wegener offered
the only interpretation that allowed them to
discover the vast oil resources of the North Sea.
Perhaps in some decades Western geologists
will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and
realize what the Russians have known since the
1950s. In the meantime, Moscow holds a massive
energy trump card.
F William
Engdahl, author of A Century of War:
Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World
Order, Pluto Press Ltd. To contact:
www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
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