While our attention has been directed toward threats to our economy from terror attacks resulting in disruptions of oil shipments from the Middle East, a titanic situation has been brewing in Nigeria. FSM Contributing Editor J. Peter Pham, Ph.D., has this critically important story.
In a study published several years ago, two scholars who themselves hail from a major petroleum-rich country, Dr. Brynjar Lia, a professor at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, and Ashild Kjok, a Norwegian diplomat with extensive Middle Eastern experience, listed seven principal vulnerable points in any given country’s oil infrastructure: production facilities, including oilfields, wells, platforms, and rigs; refineries and other processing plants; transportation facilities, including pipelines, pumping stations, terminals, and tankers; depots; corporate offices; distribution points, both wholesale and retail; and personnel employed at any of these places. The study also found that the most common disruptions, accounting for nearly two-thirds of attacks on oil infrastructure worldwide, were those relating to pipelines since they are relatively easy to repair it is not particularly cost effective, generally speaking, to guard long stretches.
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