A difficult question to answer, with any degree of specificity. The global nature of the oil industry makes it almost impossible to say where the gas contained in any particular tank originated.
Almost impossible. In a massive article today, the Chicago Tribune answers that question for the gas sold by one particular Illinois service station. And, by visiting the sources of that gas, the article gives a glimpse of just what our addiction to gas is doing to the world.
I'd encourage peoople to take some time and read the whole thing. It'll take a while; the print version covered 14 pages of closely-spaced type. It should be noted, by the way, that the article was made possible by the cooperation of the Marathon Petroleum company, which provided the information on the sources of the oil that ultimately ended up at the gas station.
The narrative switches back and forth, jumping between a suburban gas station and its staff and customers, and the people living in the lands where the oil was drilled (Nigeria and Iraq and Venezuela).
The article is far too long to excerpt in any reasonable way, but a few vignettes:
The diesel streaked past a tiny glass porthole on the truck's hoses in a smear of pale yellow, like beer, while the premium unleaded ran colorless as vodka. That particular night, according to one industry method of calculating the explosive energy locked away in crude oil, Dunbar dumped the liquid equivalent of 19.2 million hours of physical labor into the Marathon's storage tanks--or the power of a slave army of 2,200 men working around the clock for a year. This bonanza would be sucked dry by customers in 24 hours, a small, stark example of the nation's awesome petroleum appetite at a time when the planet appears to be lurching into an energy crunch of historic proportions.
Thus, $73.81 worth of unleaded pumped one Saturday afternoon by a Little League mom was traced not simply back to Africa, but to a particular set of offshore fields in Nigeria through which Ibibio villagers canoed home to children dying of curable diseases.
"You can drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on every continental shelf and atop every hill in America for that matter, and you still won't reverse the fact that our oil production is in permanent decline," said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), a senior member of the House Science Committee. "We're just sopping up what's left, digging ourselves into a deeper hole."
Binning pulled her black H2 Hummer into the station one Saturday afternoon when Qua Iboe crude from Nigeria made up about 26 percent of her $72 gas purchase. She was taking her son Parker, 8, to Little League. She estimated, sheepishly, that her vehicle gets 10 city miles per gallon, moderately better than a semitrailer truck.
[...]
Laura flashed a wan smile while ticking off her energy bills, just as she winced hearing herself describe the Hummer as "something that signals success to our clients." She knew how that sounded.
"I think the U.S. military would find our swamps worse than Iraq," snorted Austin Onuoha, a Nigerian human-rights activist who specializes in oil issues. "But at least they might build some infrastructure after they invade. Americans always do this, right?"
Onuoha's sarcasm was well-earned. He was talking in the dark, from his blacked-out house in the oil-rich Niger Delta. The electricity in Africa's petro-giant had winked out again. And this fit sourly into his main thesis: Oil is rotting Africa's frail democracies.
Nigeria, like Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Republic of Congo and Sudan, suffers from what Onuoha and many other human-rights experts call "the oil curse." In short, geysers of easy petrodollars corrupt weak African institutions. They unleash reckless government spending. And they usually stoke internecine fighting over oil loot and entrench political thuggery.
The corporation says it paid coastal communities millions of dollars in restitution after the huge 1998 spill. Reeves added that Exxon Mobil's subsidiary, in cooperation with the Nigerian national oil company, also spends an additional $10 million to $12 million a year on community development in Nigeria, most of it on education, health, roads, micro-enterprises and agricultural assistance.
Little of such money is evident in Itak Abasi, however. In May, angry mobs attacked the company's tank farm in a dispute ignited by a lack of jobs. Local people took oil workers hostage. And at least one Ibibio youth was shot dead by Nigerian security forces. The sorcerers' juju didn't work.
A former colonel in Saddam Hussein's army, Yousif, 49, works for Olive Group, a British security firm that specializes in oil field protection. He had just spent 18 months training 4,500 Iraqi recruits to patrol the nation's vital southern oil fields against sabotage and fuel smuggling.
But strange new faces were appearing at the checkpoints. They were the bearded members of local Shiite parties and their violent militias. His oil army was being infiltrated. In places like Rumailah, Iraq's boggling oil wealth was falling prey to sectarian greed.
Vice President Dick Cheney predicted the country's output might surge by 500,000 barrels a day within a year of Baghdad's fall. These liquid riches were then supposed to bankroll the nation's reconstruction, as well as supply U.S. markets.
President Bush's then-chief economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, was even bolder. "When there is a regime change in Iraq, you could add 3 million to 5 million barrels of production to world supply," he said in 2002. "The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy."
Since then, reality has been harsh.
Iraqi output still sags far below prewar levels despite a recent allocation of $1.7 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to patch up Iraq's decrepit oil fields. Violence stunts production. In mid-July, gunmen abducted the head of Iraq's Northern Oil Company. Demoralized Iraqi oil workers are burying pipelines in concrete to keep insurgents from blowing them up.
That's probably enough. I've tempted the copyright gods enough. Read the whole thing.
-dms