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Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil (John Ghazvinian - Slate)
April 14, 2007 11:35 PM
Copyright Slate
When ExxonMobil Came to Chad
April 5, 2007
Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil by John GhazvinianThe United States now imports more of its oil from Africa than it does from Saudi Arabia. How is oil and the money it brings to the continent’s treasuries transforming Africa? For his new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, John Ghazvinian traveled from the parched dust bowls of Chad and Sudan to the swamps and jungles of Nigeria and the Congo, and from the corridors of Washington to the gleaming offices of “Big Oil.” Does oil-producing Africa live up to the hype? Why is it impossible to buy bananas in Gabon, when they grow in profusion in the nation’s virgin rainforest? Can an underdeveloped country like São Tomé and Príncipe learn from other nations’ mistakes and avoid the “curse of oil”? What effect does the establishment of an oil-company compound in the middle of Chad have on the neighboring land and people? This week, we are publishing four excerpts from Untapped that answer these questions.
In 1996, ExxonMobil discovered between 800 million and 1 billion barrels of oil in the Doba basin of southern Chad. Chadian crude is of the heavy and sour variety that fetches low prices on the international market, and the country’s landlocked geography adds formidable transportation costs to any venture. Besides, with civil war and political instability a fact of life from 1965 until the early 1990s, there was never much chance of Chad’s oil industry getting off the ground. In 1996, however, there seemed to be just enough oil in Chad, and nearly enough political stability, to justify giving the country another look. ExxonMobil began to examine financing and feasibility options, setting into motion what would become one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of African oil exploration.
N’Djaména, Chad—Disagreements between multinational corporations and destitute African villages often turn into a needlessly polarized ideological battle between proponents and opponents of globalization and free-market capitalism, or into an oversimplified David and Goliath tale. I wanted to see for myself the situation around the Doba basin and whether critics were justified in heaping so much blame onto ExxonMobil. Getting there from N’Djaména, Chad’s capital, was going to be a challenge, though. In 2005 Chad’s national airline, Toumaï Air Chad, was down to one functioning plane, a battered 737 servicing six African destinations and one domestic airport in the east of the country, as well as the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Until such time as it was able to purchase a second aircraft, Toumaï regretted that it would not be providing service to southern or northern Chad.
I asked about how I might make the journey by land, but received bewildered looks and was sternly warned that it would be a rough and dusty 200-mile trek across the blazing heat of the Sahel, and very much not for the faint of heart.
None of this was a problem for ExxonMobil staff, of course, because the company had its own airport and chartered a fleet of planes making regular flights between N’Djaména and Doba. In the early days of the project, when it was still being hailed as a “model” for African oil exploration, Exxon had been happy to fly journalists south, and had bent over backward to set up tours and meetings with local managers. But this was 2005, and ExxonMobil had been burned by a slew of negative stories in the international press. So, when I approached the company six months in advance, I was told by its Houston PR department that arranging a flight would not be possible. Even if I somehow made it to Doba under my own auspices, in fact, it would not be possible to have a tour of the company’s project in southern Chad. Nor was I allowed to speak to Exxon staff at any point while I was in the country, not even off the record. Any questions I had would be answered by Houston.
Given the cost of hiring a car and driver for the two-day round-trip south—at least $200 a day—public transport rapidly emerged as my only option. At the crack of dawn one Thursday, I watched as my suitcase was lifted to the roof of a beaten-up old Land Cruiser and steadily squashed under a small mountain of accumulating bags and boxes and threadbare trunks. Off to one side, a young man unscrewed the vehicle’s fuel cap and stuck a piece of rubber tubing into the tank, to the other end of which he stuck a small plastic funnel. Out of nowhere, several glass jugs appeared, filled with gasoline, which the man steadily poured into the funnel, taking great care not to spill any.
It was as powerful an image as one could possibly ask for. Chad may have recently joined the ranks of the world’s oil-producing countries, but the country still lacks a downstream oil sector, and its citizens have yet to see what an actual gas station looks like. There is no refinery for Doba crude to be sent to, so every last drop of Chad’s crude goes straight into the ExxonMobil pipeline and straight onto supertankers parked off the Cameroonian coast. There are few cars in Chad, but those that exist (almost all of them taxis or official vehicles) operate not on Chadian oil but on Nigerian gasoline. The refined product is driven—often smuggled—across the border, and sold from glass jars in shaded spots along the side of the road that look like little more than American-style lemonade stands.
Inside, the Land Cruiser had been converted into a sort of cattle truck, with two hard wooden benches running along its length. Ten people had already squeezed in, along with more belongings, and were looking intensely uncomfortable in the scorching early-morning heat. I plumped for a $25 “first-class” ticket, thinking that sitting in the passenger seat and facing forward would make the ten-hour journey more pleasant. What I had not been told was that a first-class ticket entitled me to only half the passenger seat.
It was just as well, then, that the vehicle broke down at least eight times during the journey. (I lost count after the seventh.) The passenger seat was tilted so far forward that my neighbor and I had our arms pressed against the dashboard for the duration of the journey, and every time the driver pulled over to fiddle with the fan belt, it was a welcome chance to step out into the blessed relief of the 120-degree heat and walk around among the camels and stray goats and round mud huts, silently cursing ExxonMobil until feeling returned to my arms and legs. On the way back, two days later, I treated myself to both first-class seats. After all, it was my birthday.
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Posted at 11:35 PM