For several years a number of loosely-knit guerrilla organizations have been fighting the major oil producers and the central government of Nigeria. Their grievances are: poverty, environmental degradation and corruption. I don’t approve of the use of violence to sort these things out.

This post is about the increasing ability of open-source groups to project power far beyond what we traditionally think of as guerrilla war.

To wit, an attack this week by the MEND guerrilla group on a Royal Dutch Shell drilling platform 75 miles off the coast of Nigeria. Keep in mind, this is for all intents and purposes, the open ocean. At sea, the horizon is about 11 miles.

The effective disabling of this platform takes 200,000 barrels per day offline. That is as much by which Saudi Arabia pledged last week to increase its production to offset higher prices. According to the BBC Report:

Nigeria’s valuable offshore oilfields had always been considered difficult for most militants to target, the BBC’s Alex Last reports from Lagos.

But early on Thursday, gunmen in boats reached the Bonga installation, Shell’s flagship project, for the first time.

…

A Nigerian navy spokesman confirmed reports that militants had kidnapped a US oil worker from a separate vessel on their way back from the raid.
…
The shutdown has cut a tenth of Nigeria’s total output in one go.

This comes on top of a reduction of at least 20% in recent years following inland attacks.

Capable of producing 200,000 barrels of oil and 150 million sq ft of gas per day
Oil and gas drawn up from 16 well heads on the ocean floor to a processing tanker

Our correspondent says Bonga was new, expensive and working well despite the difficulties and repeated attacks affecting the company’s inshore operations in the Delta.

So, an impoverished, rag-tag militia in Nigeria has the capability to launch an open-sea operation to disable a billion dollar oil drilling operation and cut the production of one of the worlds largest producers of light-sweet crude (the best kind) by one-fifth.

The takeaways from this lesson should be:

One: High oil prices are supply and demand based. The world is using as much oil as it produces every day. Disruptions in all the nasty places where God put the oil cause prices to go up because there is no give in the market.

Two: This is the downside the Internet Age of instant communications and global collaboration which has transformed the world in the last 20 years. While we were busy paying bills online, watching Linux and the free development community have been doing with the Internets: sharing and innovating. And not always in ways that are beneficial to those of us in the Good Ole US of A which invented the whole thing.

This entry was posted on June 21, 2008 at 11:56 pm and is filed under 4th Generation Warfare, Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.