Amid Africa's oil boom, U.S. binds ties

Potentially major oil strikes announced by an American-led consortium and a British company in West Africa have bolstered the region’s reputation as the world’s hottest energy zone.

It has also become the focus of the U.S. military’s global mission to protect America’s energy supplies, a development that critics fear will trigger more trouble than it will prevent.

The Texas-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp. said Wednesday its deepwater Venus 1B well off the coast of Sierra Leone had hit paydirt and formed one of two “bookends” 700 miles apart across two prospective basins that extend into waters controlled by Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.

These could each contain 150 million to 1 billion barrels of oil, according to Anadarko’s CEO Al Walker.

One of Anadarko’s consortium partners, Tullow Oil of Britain, which has a vast array of licenses in Africa, recently announced a new potentially important discovery in its Ngassa field in Uganda.

By 2025, the United States is expected to be importing about one-fifth of its oil from West Africa. That makes the region strategically important to the United States.

In the scramble for new oil reserves as the planet’s older fields become depleted, the U.S. military has become a predominant force in U.S.-African relations.

UPI