by Jim Fisher-Thompson and Bruce Greenberg
03-03-06
US-Africa trade ties can grow only stronger as one in five barrels of oil
consumed in America in the next few decades most likely will come from the
continent, says a top US energy official.
Currently, 15 % of US oil imports comes from Africa, according to George Person,
acting deputy assistant secretary for international energy policy at the US
Department of Energy. Person participated in a March 1 discussion on Africa and
International Energy Security sponsored by the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation.
Sullivan was a prominent African-American minister and businessman who
operated self-help programs in the United States and abroad and established an
important set of ethical guidelines -- known as the Sullivan Principles -- for
foreign investors and businesses operating in apartheid-era South Africa during
the 1980s and early 1990s.
Person was joined on the panel by Edmund Daukoru, Nigeria's minister of state
for petroleum resources and currently president of OPEC. Former US Ambassador to
Nigeria Howard Jeter was in the audience. Daukoru also addressed the US Chamber
of Commerce March 2 on the topic of energy security.
Person told the Sullivan Foundation panel: "Close to 20 % of [US] net oil
imports are coming from Africa. Think about that. Some analysts are even
forecasting that that number could increase tremendously."
In addition to oil, there are other opportunities in Africa, the US official
said. For example, "natural gas, particularly liquefied natural gas, is
increasingly becoming more of a global commodity, and the US is a major consumer
of that," he said.
Certainly, there are challenges to this increased trade, Person said. But
Americans, he said, must move beyond the challenges and focus on more than oil
and gas. The dialogue, he said, also should be about "energy services, trade and
investment, economic empowerment," as well as public and private partnerships.
Person said, "We have had very good discussions at the Department of Energy
between the minister [Daukoru] and [Energy] Secretary [Samuel] Bodman, who has
emphasized the importance of working with Africans" on mutual energy concerns.
As president of OPEC, Daukoru heads the organization whose 11 member nations
hold two-thirds of all proven oil reserves. Its chief aim is to keep the price
of oil stabilized to eliminate fluctuations that might imperil a steady income
flow to its oil-producing members. Although most of the Gulf states are members,
large producers like the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia are not.
Even though Nigeria is the only sub-Saharan nation in OPEC, the African energy
resource base throughout West and Southern Africa is substantial and very
promising, Daukoru said. Already, he added, the United States receives about 8 %
of all its oil imports from Nigeria and 7 % from Angola, and fields in the Gulf
of Guinea area "are of increasing importance for [energy] supplies to the US".
African oil, he said, also has "the advantage of being light and sweet
[easier to refine] and comes from the Atlantic rim, and you have investments
across the Atlantic Ocean and therefore in the same [geologic] basin."
Daukoru predicted that natural gas soon will rival oil as a major energy source
worldwide: "Gas has become a cleaner fuel than oil, and at least for utilities'
purposes, and to some extent transportation, gas is going to rival oil. We
estimate that in the next 20-25 years gas will get very close to overtaking oil"
in world markets.
This is good news for Africa, the Nigerian said, because gas has "a big
resource base in Nigeria, offshore Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea -- also to some
extent in Angola."
"The resource [in Africa] is huge, but so is the challenge of bringing that to
the marketplace," and that will involve partnerships with companies and
organizations familiar with mobilizing energy resources, Daukoru concluded.
Source: http://usinfo.state.gov