Texaco engineers reach down into Davy Jones' locker for new supplies of oil.
Down into the oil-bearing formations beneath the coastal waters, sinks the drill pipe... on its way to find oil.
It got there with the help of a strange kind of barge... a barge that is sunk to rest on the bottom of swamps or lakes. It is called a submersible drilling barge ... and was developed by Texaco engineers to drill for oil under water.
Resting on the bottom, the submersible barge forms a firm foundation for drilling machinery. After the well has been drilled, the barge is refloated and moved away to another location - leaving the pipe in position, to bring up new supplies of precious oil.
This is one of numerous ingenious devices developed by Texaco to speed up production of oil, now so urgently needed by the fighting forces of Democracy. At Texaco refineries, this all-vital oil is converted into 100-octane aviation gasoline ... into quality fuels and lubricants for all kinds of vehicles ... into Toluene for high explosives and Butadiene for synthetic rubber.
When peace comes, the lessons learned in Texaco's great war job will be applied to making finer fuels and lubricants for your car.
The Texas Company.
Either way, what was then is now. The U.S. military continues to burn fuel to secure fuel and other resources required to sustain a state of perpetual war. On December 31, 2010, I reported a few of this century's details on U.S. Defense Department fuel purchases, for KPFA Radio News:
The Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornet flew over Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., on Earth Day, April 22, 2010, powered by a blend of 50 percent biofuel and 50 percent kerosene-based jet propulsion fuel. The FA-18F is a new generation of the FA-18s, which include the FA-18Es that fly over San Francisco each October on Columbus Day during the Blue Angels Air Show. In 2010, San Francisco’s Fleet Week and Blue Angels Air Show, which comes to the city every October at the City of San Francisco’s invitation, showcased Boeing’s new AH-64D biofuel-powered attack helicopter.
KPFA News Anchor Anthony Fest: The U.S. military uses far more fuel than any branch of the American government, and the U.S. Air Force uses far more fuel than its other branches. On Dec. 20,
Defense Industry Daily, a trade publication reporting military purchasing news for defense procurement managers and contractors, reported that the
Defense Logistics Agency had issued over $1.5 billion worth of fuel contracts this month. Africa peace and social justice activists say that more and more of the fuel consumed by the U.S. military, and by other U.S. consumers, comes from Africa. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has the story.
KPFA/Ann Garrison: The Defense Logistics Agency typically issues large sets of fuel contracts over concentrated periods during the year, but continues to issue fuel contracts all year long. Defense fuel purchases are typically frenzied during the month of March. In March 2009, DLA fuel contracts totaled $5.5 billion. Last month, as of Dec. 20, the agency had issued over $1.5 billion in fuel contracts.
Africa activists have pointed out that more and more of the fuel consumed by the U.S. military and other American consumers comes from Africa and that Africa has surpassed the Middle East as a source of U.S. oil imports.
Emira Woods is a Liberian-American scholar and activist and the editor of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
Liberian-American Emira Woods of the Institute for Policy Studies says that this is confirmed by Department of Energy statistics:
Emira Woods, Institute for Policy Studies: That’s from the Department of Energy tables. They come out at the end of each year. So they’re about to come out now for 2010. At the end of December they’ll come out for 2010. It’s basically looking at those Department of Energy oil imports. So for Africa, it’s about 24 percent. From the Middle East, it’s varied over the years, from 21 to 19, since 2008.
KPFA: Organizations like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Brookings Institute have raised concerns about meeting the U.S. military’s huge demand for fuel in the future, and both coal-to-liquid transportation fuel and biofuels have been proposed as substitutes. The U.S. military is already the largest consumer of coal-to-liquid transportation fuel, mostly purchased from the South African SASOL Corp. And in March 2009, Aviation Week announced that U.S. Air Force officials would acquire more than 300,000 gallons of biofuels for use in a 50-50 mix with kerosene-based jet fuel by 2013.
In “Biofuels and Neocolonialism,” a group of six scholars writing for the Pambazuka News said that biofuels had caused “a new and massive land-grabbing scramble in Africa, unprecedented since the fall of colonialism, claimed to be justified by fears of global climate change.”
Eric Brooks of Our City, a San Francisco community activist organization, is a leader in the San Francisco Green Party.
The
San Francisco Green Party’s Eric Brooks has long spoken out against such claims:
Eric Brooks, San Francisco Green Party: We all know that the main reason the U.S. military exists in its massive state right now is to go around the world and grab places that have fossil fuel and guard that fossil fuel, so that we can get it and use it and corporations can sell it. And it’s just really twisted logic to burn crop-based bio-fuels to go grab fossil fuels like oil.
KPFA: Mozambique, Burkina Faso and many other African countries have rejected biofuels, and an American biofuels corporation, EcoFuel Global, has stirred anger with its biofuels project in Rwanda, where land is scarce, population is dense, and people are hungry.
For Pacifica-KPFA Radio, I’m Ann Garrison.
