TESTIMONY BY ANNE
KORIN
CO-DIRECTOR
INSTITUTE FOR THE
ANALYSIS OF GLOBAL SECURITY (IAGS)
Presented before
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Rising
Oil Prices, Declining National Security
May 22, 2008
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, about ten years ago,
Osama bin Laden stated that his target price for oil is $144 a barrel and that
the American people, who allegedly robbed the Muslim people of their oil, owe
each Muslim man, woman, and child $30,000 in back payments. At the time, $144 a
barrel seemed farfetched to most. Today, bin Laden is a mere $20 a barrel short
of his target and there is little doubt it will be attained. I would like to
impress upon this Committee that $144 a barrel oil will be perceived as a
victory for the Jihadist movement and a reaffirmation that the economic warfare
component of its campaign against the West is a resounding success. There is no
need to elaborate on the implications of such a victory in terms of loss of U.S. prestige
and our ability to prevail in the Long War of the 21st century. It
is therefore imperative that the U.S. Congress do its utmost to forestall such
a setback.
Deeply embroiled in a struggle against radical Islam,
nuclear proliferation, and totalitarianism, the U.S. faces a crude reality: While
its relations with the Muslim world are at an all-time low, more than 70
percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and over a third of production are
concentrated in Muslim countries. The very same Shi‘a and Sunni theocratic and
dictatorial regimes that most strongly resist America’s
efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East
are the ones that, because of the market’s tightness, currently drive the world
oil economy. While the U.S.
economy bleeds, oil-producing countries like Saudi
Arabia and Iran—sympathetic to, and directly
supportive, of radical Islam—are on the receiving end of staggering windfalls.
In 2006, the United States
spent about $260 billion on foreign crude oil and refined petroleum products.
This year, with oil hovering over $125 a barrel, the figure could surpass $500
billion, the equivalent of our defense budget. At today's prices, foreign oil producers are extracting a tax of more than
$1,600 a year from every American man, woman and child.
While we in the U.S., which
enjoys a per capita income of over $40,000 a year, are feeling the sharp pinch
of high oil prices, we should all consider the impact of these prices on the
world’s poor. People throughout the world who live on $2 a day are suffering
far more than we can imagine as their economies hemorrhage. This has profound
implications for global security, driving regional unrest, increasing poverty,
and nipping in the bud progress towards democracy. Countries that are still
carrying debts from the 1970’s oil shocks, are being now looted by OPEC price
fixing. In fact, we are witnessing a tremendous transfer of wealth from the
world’s poorest to the world’s producers of oil.
OPEC, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, is deliberately
keeping oil supply tight to prop up prices. Not only is Saudi production lower
today than it was two years ago, despite the increase in demand, but the cartel
has effectively deleted 2.4mbd from the global oil market in what amounts to an
accounting scam. In 2007, OPEC expanded its member roster to include Ecuador and Angola – together the two had
accounted for nearly 2.4mbd of non-OPEC oil. Yet, total OPEC production remained
constant, allowing existing members to reduce production. This translates into
a net reduction in non-OPEC supply with no equivalent increase in OPEC supply. This
is equivalent to the production of Norway disappearing off the market .
Further, while non-OPEC production has doubled over the last thirty years, as
the graph below shows, OPEC production today is virtually identical to its
production thirty years ago, even as the global economy has grown and with it
demand for oil.
![](kor052208_files/image002.jpg)
Source: WTRG Economics
The flow of petrodollars from consuming economies to the
coffers of producers not only casts a large shadow over America’s prospects of
winning the war on terrorism but it also limits U.S. diplomatic maneuverability
on central issues like human rights and nuclear proliferation. Perhaps the most powerful statement of the impact on America’s
ability to accomplish its foreign policy goals came from Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, who in April 2006 told the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee: “We do have to do
something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really
taken me aback more, as Secretary of State, than the way that the politics of
energy is . . . “warping” diplomacy around the world. It has given
extraordinary power to some states that are using that power in not very good
ways for the international system, states that would otherwise have very little
power.”
One of these states is Iran. With 10
percent of the world’s oil reserves and the world’s second largest
natural gas reserve, Iran’s
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems unfazed by the
prospects of international sanctions against his country as a result of its
efforts to develop nuclear weapons. At high oil prices, leaders of human-rights
violating countries like Azerbaijan,
Chad, Sudan, Turkmenistan,
and Uzbekistan,
too, can persecute their people with impunity. Another setback to democracy was
delivered last May when Kazakhstan’s
leader Nursultan Nazarbayev declared himself president for life. The
control over a large part of the world’s oil and gas market allows Russia
to bully its European neighbors, to play “hard to get” on Iran, and to undermine democracy in former Soviet
republics like Ukraine and Georgia. Should
Russia and other major gas
producers like Iran
go forth with plans to create an OPEC like natural gas cartel, we can expect
further consolidation of power among the energy producers. Oil also lubricates
the so-called Bolivarian revolution led by Venezuela’s
President Hugo Chavez, who is using Venezuela’s
oil wealth to buy political influence in the Western
Hemisphere and to consolidate an anti-U.S. bloc in the region.
U.S. diplomacy is further complicated by the indefatigable
thirst for energy of emerging countries like China
and India, which are
becoming increasingly dependent on the very same countries the United States
is trying to rein in. The growing appetite of developing Asian powers not only
plays into the hands of the aforementioned rogue producing nations, but also
feeds what could become a global competition for control of energy
resources. Rogue nations like Iran
and Sudan can now buy
themselves the support of a third of humanity – not to mention the protection
of Chinese veto power on the U.N. Security Council – by signing energy deals
with China and India. India
now at stands at a crossroads. As its electricity demand grows it faces three
options. It can tie itself to Iran, the holder of the world’s second largest
natural gas reserve, via the proposed 1600 mile long Iran-Pakistan-India
pipeline. Last month, Iran’s
President Ahmadinejad visited India
and Pakistan
in an effort to seal the deal on this project. The implications of such a
pipeline should be very clear: decades long dependence of one billion Indians
on Iran.
Alternatively, India
can continue to develop its coal reserves and expand coal power generation.
This is a sound approach from an energy security perspective; however, India has been coming under global pressure –
including that of the U.S.
government - to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. India’s
third option is to expand nuclear power development, in collaboration with the U.S. At this
point, foot dragging in Delhi is delaying ratification
of a nuclear agreement with the U.S.
It appears that the Iranian option may hold sway. As the largest democracy in
the world, India is a vital
ally to the United States.
Congress should explore all options – including encouraging India and Pakistan
to pursue an alternative pipeline route from Turkmenistan
via Afghanistan – to ensure
that India does not tie its
economic future to Iran.
Stripping oil of its
strategic value
The unique strategic importance of oil to the modern
economy—beyond that of any other commodity today—stems from the fact that the
global economy’s very enabler, the transportation sector, is utterly dependent
on it, with 220 million cars and trucks in the United States alone (today,
contrary to popular belief, only 2 percent of U.S. electricity is generated
from oil, and conversely only about 2 percent of U.S. oil demand is due to
electricity generation.) With 97 percent of U.S.
transportation energy based on petroleum, oil is the lifeblood of America’s
economy. America
is poor in oil relative to its need. It consumes one of every four gallons in
the world but has barely 3 percent of the world’s proven reserves of
conventional oil. The United
States now imports over 60 percent of its
oil, more than twice the ratio of imports before the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo.
Neither efforts to expand petroleum supply nor those to
crimp petroleum demand will be enough to reduce America’s strategic vulnerability
anytime soon. When the British Navy made the shift from coal to oil, then Lord
of the Admiralty Winston Churchill famously remarked, “safety and certainty in
oil lies in variety and variety alone.” To diminish the strategic importance of
oil to the international system it is now critical to expand the Churchillian
doctrine beyond geographical variety to a variety of fuels and feedstocks.
Oil’s strategic value derives from its virtual monopoly on
transportation fuel. This monopoly, which gives intolerable power to OPEC and
the nations that dominate oil ownership and production, must be broken. Not
long ago, technology broke the power of another strategic commodity. Until
around the end of the nineteenth century salt had such a position because it
was the only means of preserving meat. Odd as it seems today, salt mines
conferred national power and wars were even fought over control of them. Today, no nation sways history because it has
salt mines. Salt is still a useful commodity for a range of purposes. We import
some salt, so if one defines independence as autarky we are not “salt
independent”. But to most of us there is no “salt dependence” problem at all —
because canning, electricity and refrigeration decisively ended salt’s monopoly
of meat preservation, and thus its strategic importance. We can and must do the
same thing to oil.
17 X 17
Today’s vehicles have an average lifespan of 17 years and,
for the most part, can run only on petroleum. Every year 17 million new cars
roll onto America’s
roads. For a cost of less than $100 extra as compared
to a gasoline-only vehicle, automakers can make virtually any car a flex fuel
vehicle, capable of running on any combination of gasoline and a variety of alcohols
such as ethanol and methanol, made from a variety of feedstocks, from
agricultural material, to waste, to coal. (Alcohol does not just mean ethanol,
and ethanol does not just mean corn.) Flex fuel vehicles provide a platform on
which fuels can compete and let consumers and the market choose the winning
fuels and feedstocks based on economics. In Brazil, where ethanol is widely
used, the share of flex fuel vehicles in new car sales rose from 4 percent to
67 percent in just three years, and this year stands at about 90 percent. These
cars are manufactured by the same automakers that sell to the U.S. market and
entail no size, power, or safety compromise by consumers. The proliferation of flex fuel vehicles in Brazil has
driven fuel competition at the pump to the point where the Brazilian oil
industry has had to keep gasoline prices sufficiently low to compete with
ethanol in order not to lose more market share, so low that it actually just
received a government subsidy to do so. Competition in Brazil is working so well that a big Brazilian
sugar and ethanol firm just bought out the distribution assets of Exxon in Brazil.
![](kor052208_files/image004.jpg)
Source:UNICA
Expanding U.S.
fuel choice to include biofuels imported from developing countries has
significant geopolitical benefits at a time when U.S. global standing is eroding. Sugar,
from which ethanol can be cheaply and efficiently produced, is now grown in one
hundred countries, many of which are poor and on the receiving end of U.S.
development aid. Encouraging these countries to increase their output and
become fuel suppliers, opening our fuel market to them by removing the
protectionist 54 cent a gallon ethanol tariff, could have far-reaching
implications for their economic development. By creating economic
interdependence with biomass-producing countries in Africa, Asia, and the
Western Hemisphere, the United
States can strengthen its position in the developing
world and provide significant help in reducing poverty.
At this point, the fallacy that increased use of biofuels in
general, and corn ethanol in particular, is driving world hunger must be
addressed. The primary drivers of price increases for food
commodities spanning the spectrum from fish to rice (neither of which are used
to make fuel) and beyond are the massive increases in oil prices -- raising the
cost of distribution, labor, packaging and so forth; commodity speculation
driven by a weak dollar and increased calorie demand from hundreds of millions
of people in China and India who have risen out of poverty and bare
subsistence. Further, despite corn ethanol production, the U.S. corn food and
feed product has increased 34 percent over the last five years, and U.S. food
exports overall have increased 23 percent on the year. America is
clearly doing its share to feed the world.
The International
Energy Agency has reiterated that biofuels are key to keeping the lid on an
overheated transportation fuel market. According to Merrill Lynch, without the
increase in biofuels production, oil prices would have been 15 percent higher,
which at current oil prices translates into a savings of over $80 billion a
year to the U.S.
economy. The much derided biofuels program which has facilitated this $80
billion saving, costs the taxpayer $4 billion a year. By any reasonable
standard it is a far better deal to send money to America’s farmers than to various
petro-dictators.
Since we hardly generate any electricity
from oil, using electricity as a transportation fuel enables the full spectrum
of electricity sources to compete with petroleum. Plug in hybrid electric
vehicles (PHEVs) can reach oil economy levels of 100 miles per gallon of
gasoline without compromising the size, safety, or power of a vehicle. The key
is changing our thinking from miles per gallon to miles per gallon of oil-based
fuel – it is not the total energy consumption of the vehicle which is the
problem, it is the portion of that energy that comes from petroleum. If a PHEV
is also a flexible-fuel vehicle powered by 85 percent alcohol and 15 percent
gasoline, oil economy could reach over 500
miles per gallon of gasoline.
Ideally, plug-in hybrids would be charged at night in home or apartment
garages, when electric utilities have significant reserve capacity. The
Department of Energy estimates that over 70
percent of the U.S.
vehicle market could shift to plug-in hybrids without needing to install
additional baseload electricity-generating capacity.
Thinking Out of the
Barrel
A nationwide deployment of
flex-fuel cars, flex fuel plug-in hybrids, and alternative fuels could take
place within two decades. But such a transformation will not occur by
itself. In a perfect world government would not need to intervene in the energy
market, but in a time of war, the United States is taking an
unacceptable risk by leaving the problem to be solved by the invisible hand.
This is especially true since the energy market is anything but free. It is
manipulated by a cartel, heavily rigged in favor of the status quo, and, as the
case of the ethanol tariff shows, riddled with protectionism.
Every year that passes without Congressional action to
ensure that new cars sold in America
are flex fuel vehicles is another year in which 17 million gasoline-only cars
start their 17-year life on U.S.
roads, further binding us to foreign oil. On the grounds of national security and
in the interest of stemming the hemorrhaging of our economy, Congress should take
swift action to require that new vehicles sold in the United States are
flexible fuel vehicles. Such an Open Fuel Standard would level the playing
field and promote free competition among diverse energy suppliers. Choosing not to embrace an Open Fuel Standard, is choosing to
preserve oil’s monopoly in the transportation sector, and with it OPEC’s
growing stranglehold over the global economy.