Thoughts on Geopolitics of Oil

“So why is this interesting?” asked my friend, whose interest is neither political nor technical, since I had rearrange meeting her in favour of going to a geopolitical lecture on energy security. I wish I could’ve given a more interesting answer, why I was even reading a paper by one of the speakers that day.

The talk was organised by the Imperial College Energy Society, titled Geopolitics of Oil and Energy Security: The UK, Middle East and Asia. There were 3 speakers, but their message was more or less the same. For example, John Michell is a researcher fellow at Chatham House (Chatham House is the current name for the Royal Institute of International Affairs), and the content of his talk can be found here.

The talk focused on oil, and message is this: the UK no longer produces as much oil as it used to. Just looking for the Middle East for oil may not be enough, because of political issues, and because Asia (or more specifically China) wants oil from them too. We may have to rely on Russia for energy, and that may have political implications. Interestingly the USA haven’t got that problem, because they have a huge store of natural gas, perhaps in the form of shale gas, but that’s another problem (the extraction of those kind of gas is very ‘leaky’, and very bad for the environment for carbon dioxide emission, as well as poisoning the land).
The interesting most part of the talk is the questions people asked at the end:

1) The speakers talked of political security (for example wars and stable governments etc.) and environmental concerns (“climate change”, mainly), so someone asked how those concerns are balanced? How the UK would, for example, chose between environmentally damaging by politically stable oil sources, such as Canadian Tar Sand, and politically bad sources like Libya?

2) If energy is so important to the economy, for example, to the USA, why haven’t they massively improved the efficiency of their transport? Incidentally we have been told that China sees it dependence on oil a massive security issue, and is vigorously pushing for electric cars...

3) How should the UK interact with corrupted but really oil rich nation (for example Nigeria, where because the whole of the GDP is basically from oil, their government really do only focus on serving the oil company and little else)? How can their policies compete with China’s non-intervention stance?