Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil
Oil’s history is one of blood, corruption, war, pollution, and vast riches. It first started with John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Those were the days when oil was thought to be unlimited and a barrel of crude cost about one dollar (about $10-20 in today’s value). Oil has a long and arduous history. The first major oil companies were mostly American; they took advantage of developing countries around the world. ExxonMobil, Texaco, Shell Oil, Chevron, and other large oil companies took advantage of under-developed countries such as Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, and Ecuador, polluting their environment, dumping enormous amounts of toxic waste-water, bribing politicians, and much more (Maas).
Petroleum dates back to Babylon where according to Herodotus asphalt was used in the construction of the towers of Babylon. The first commercial oil well was drilled in Poland in 1853 and expanded quickly after then due to the rise of the internal combustion engine and plastics. Throughout the 1950s-1980s approximately 10 of the top 20 companies in America with the highest revenue were oil companies. Nowadays, 6 of the top 20 companies in America are oil companies; this is due to dwindling oil supplies, American oil companies losing their oil fields as their contracts run out, and other (mostly state-owned) companies take over the oil fields in their respective countries.
Interestingly, oil-rich countries are also the poorest countries per capita (other than a few exceptions such as Norway). In Equatorial Guinea corruption is rampant as exemplified by their President, Teodoro Obiang. In his book entitled “Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil,” Peter Maas says, “His personal armada was a projection of fear, not strength, because uneasy lies the head of a man who clutches a nation’s wealth. Obiang, whose salary was reportedly $60,000 a year, had recently been discovered to control bank accounts exceeding $700 million.” He adds that, “every dysfunctional oil country is dysfunctional in its own way.” In Equatorial Guinea, large oil corporations bribed corrupt dictators and officials who awarded exploration and production contracts that were unduly generous to the oil companies (Maas, 35). Maas adds that, “In a nation where ownership of a soccer ball was a sign of wealth,” Obiang a multi-millionaire dictator has exploited his country’s oil for his own personal gain (Maas, 33). He further says, “If the revenues were spread evenly around the country, the people in Equatorial Guinea would be among the richest in the world.” (Maas, 37) Oil in Equatorial Guinea has not led to prosperity for the average citizen and has polluted their environment tremendously. Furthermore, Obiang was helped by American bankers and oilmen who deposited over 700 million dollars into his personal bank accounts at Riggs bank in Washington D.C. (Peter Maas, 252)
In Nigeria, Africa’s biggest exporter of oil, the story is not very different. Peter Maas says, “I visited Nigeria to learn how oil had turned a once healthy country, and the people who lived there, into a specimen of rot.” Foreign oil companies, after finding oil in the Niger Delta, paid the government military to protect their wells and paid local militias not to attack them; they were actually feeding the conflict between the militias and the government which were able to buy weapons with the oil companies’ money. Before oil was discovered in Nigeria, the country had a growing industrial sector and a healthy farm economy. With its British-educated elite, Nigeria’s prospects were bright in 1960 when it became independent. Furthermore, its people were led to believe that the newly discovered oil treasure in the delta guaranteed a brilliant future. And yet as Peter Maas says, “Now the world’s eighth- largest exporter of oil, Nigeria earned more than $400 billion from oil in recent decades, yet nine out of ten citizens live on less than $2 a day and one out of five children dies before his fifth birthday.” (Maas, 53) Additionally oil has brought colossal environmental and health costs to Nigeria. Flaring of released gases when oil is extracted is common and releases carcinogens such as benzene, benzopyrene, and toluene. Furthermore released metals into the air supply include mercury, arsenic, and chromium and emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide are so severe in the delta that acid rain eats through sheet-metal roofs (Maas, 65).
Until the drillers arrived, the Orient region of Ecuador was an undisturbed rain forest inhabited by indigenous Indian tribes,” said Maas. Ecuador produces about 500,000 barrels of oil a day, with the largest portion of exports going to California. Peter Maas adds, “Whether it is irony, parody or farce, one of the most environmentally conscious states in America depends on oil from a region that has suffered a catastrophe to provide it.” (Maas, 78) To illustrate the disregard oil companies have for the environment lets look at the Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline. The pipelines and its subsidiaries rest on rickety pylons one or two feet high and just a few feet—or sometimes inches—from roads. Swerving into these pipelines is common and leads to oil spills. Furthermore, collisions aren’t even necessary to create spills because the pipelines are old and poorly maintained. Up until the 1990s local residents say the environmental carelessness involved the spraying of oil on dirt roads, so as to suppress the waves of dust that rose from them (Maas, 79). Pollution in Ecuador has been unacceptable. During extraction, a slurry of oil, salt, and metals including benzene, chromium 6, and mercury comes up. In America this slurry is disposed of by reinjection the tainted water into the reservoirs or filtering out contaminants, but in Ecuador Texaco dumped the brew into unlined waste pits or poured it directly into the Amazon’s rivers. More than 18 billion gallons of wastewater was disposed of this way as well as 16 million gallons of oil—far more than the Exxon Valdez supertanker spill and the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico (Maas, 79).
Oil, considered “liquid gold,” has been a calamity for these three countries. Big and powerful oil companies took advantage of the weak, corrupt, established governments. And as Peter Maas said, “in countries too weak to control powerful industries that tend to behave responsibly only if they are required to, the invasion of bulldozers and other machines of extraction is a disaster foretold.” (Maas, 77) As a society we must recognize these problems and hold oil companies responsible for the irreparable harm they have done. Oil’s history is not pretty or nice; this liquid gold is a curse for the earth and without proper regulations and fighting from international organizations will remain so.
Works Cited
Maas, Peter. Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. Knopf. 22 Sept. 2009. Web. 23 Apr. 2012.
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