Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
some 4000 tankers plying the world's oceans, to which must be added a
growing number of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) tankers.
All tankers are slow. Some are also very cumbersome to manoeuvre,
because of their size. “Super-tankers” are more than 500,000 deadweight
tonnes. So they are vulnerable to attack either on the high seas or as they
have to pass through narrow chokepoints. A very high proportion of the
world's tankers have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz to exit the Gulf,
and then - depending on whether they are west- or east-bound - either
the Bab-el-Mandeb entrance to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal or the
Straits of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia.
So far, there have only been a few attacks on oil tankers (and none
yet on an LNG tanker). The attacks have been limited to a few incidents
inside the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, an al-Qaeda attack
on a French tanker off Yemen, and the capture of a Saudi tanker in the
Red Sea by Somali pirates in 2008. Nonetheless the impact on world oil
trade of one or other chokepoints being closed off would be considerable.
US energy independence
motivator and mirage
In the light of all the security entanglements that oil dependence has
brought the US, it is not surprising that many Americans and their
presidents have worried for decades about increasing US reliance on oil
imports. These constituted 30 percent of total oil consumption at the time
of the 1973 Arab oil embargo on the US, and amount to 65 percent today.
Even though Americans depend on foreign oil no more than Europeans,
and far less than Asians, they fret more than others about oil import
dependence. There are several reasons for this. At the time of World War
II, the US was the premier oil
exporter
: its current status is something of
an Achilles heel for a world superpower. It also links Washington to some
very conservative Arab regimes, and in the context of the Arab-Israeli
conflict, could hypothetically compromise the US's support for Israel,
(though there is no evidence of this in practice).
So calls for energy or oil independence have become a mantra of suc-
cessive presidents: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George W.Bush, and now
Barack Obama. It's a theme that resonates well with US public opinion
- it's more persuasive than climate change as a motivation for practising
energy conservation and promoting alternative energy. Drives for energy
independence have been used to justify measures ranging from the intro-
