A session with the US Energy Security Council

Gustavo Coronel 10/16/13
A session with the U.S. Energy Security Council 

The U.S. Energy Security Council is a group of very distinguished Americans: former Washington cabinet members, top military leaders and former CEO’s from big corporations, coming together to address the issue of oil’s monopoly over transportation fuel. 

The Council “advocates proven transformational policies designed to diminish oil’s strategic value by opening the transportation fuel market to competition”. 

See http://www.usesc.org/energy_security/index.php/members

In March of this year I was honored to address this group by telephone on the outlook of the oil Venezuelan oil industry, see http://lasarmasdecoronel.blogspot.com/2013/03/my-opinion-on-pdvsa-in-oil-journal.html . 

Tuesday, October 15, I was invited to a meeting of the Council, held at the National Press Club, in downtown Washington. I took it to be an invitation to listen, but I ended up as a member of a round table, sitting together with many legendary figures: TV’s Ted Koppel, James Schlesinger (former Secretary of Energy and of Defense), Norman Augustine (Former CEO, Lockheed Martin), John Hofmeister (Former CEO, Shell), Robert McFarlane (former National Security Advisor) and several other political and corporate big leaguers. 

The meeting began with a conversation between Ted Koppel and James Schlesinger about the Arab Oil embargo of 1973. Both Koppel and Schlesinger were main actors in that drama and they recounted it for us, Schlesinger providing very interesting recollections. After the Koppel-Schlesinger conversation, the Council discussion began. I felt more like asking for autographs from these people than as a participant in the round table. 

I was the second person to be asked for comments by the Moderator, Anne Korin. Her question had to do with the current situation within OPEC, given that some of the members have an excess of money (Saudi Arabia) while others need it desperately (Venezuela). I said that (see  http://www.c-span.org/Events/Energy-Security-Conference-Looks-at-Alternatives-to-Foreign-Oil/10737442057-1/  , at about minute 57) Venezuela was no longer a powerful member of OPEC and that OPEC itself had lost much power since it was not a monolithic block. 

In parallel the U.S. was riding a big wave of energy abundance, thanks to shale gas and oil and did not need to import as much oil as before. I added that Venezuela/PDVSA were technically broke and depended on China to provide funds since oil production had declined and much of the oil exports went to ideologically friendly countries that did not pay. I said OPEC was no longer the powerful cartel of yesteryears. 

This opinion of mine seemed to run against the perception of some of the members of the Council that still see OPEC as holding consumers hostage. 

The fact is that OPEC provides today a much smaller share of the global oil supply. Consuming countries, on the other hand, enjoy many energy source alternatives: conventional oil, unconventional oil (Canada), shale oil and gas (several countries), and renewables, particularly the rather new alternative of producing Methanol (not to be confused with Ethanol) from natural gas. 

This alternative is gaining great momentum in the U.S. since it is both economically and technically feasible. 

An article in the Wall Street Journal, October 10 , : “A chemistry breakthrough that could fuel a revolution”, by George Olah and Chris Cox, describes how shale gas and recycled carbon dioxide can be converted into methanol, a fuel that can be mixed with gasoline to be used as transport fuel. 

As this technological breakthrough is taking place, the Council’s priority task is to promote the legislation that could put methanol on the same tax footing as ethanol, in order for the new technology to become an alternative at the pump. Dr. George A. Olah, the co-author of the WSJ article, is a Nobel laureate in Chemistry. 

In the round table the person sitting next to me was Dr. Surya Prakash, a partner of Dr. Olah in Methanol research. It was announced during the meeting that this team had been awarded a one million dollars prize by the government of Israel, as the best energy initiative of the year to find alternatives to gasoline as a transport fuel. I congratulated my neighbor. 

Statements supporting methanol as an alternative to gasoline came from MIT expert Daniel Cohn ( MIT Energy Initiative), Greg Dolan( Methanol Institute), Deron Lovaas (Natural Resource Defense Council), Joseph Cannon ( Fuel Freedom Foundation) and Frank Gaffney ( Center for Security Policy). 

The meeting was open to members of the China Embassy in Washington and to Chinese experts such as Dr. Liu Quiang. I had a brief talk with Dr. Liu and he said they were producing methanol from coal and that this process proved to be economic. I asked him about the position of China in Venezuela but he just smiled.

The message of the Council is that there is a need for free choice of fuel at the pump. This choice should not simply be, as Mr. Augustine pointed out: premium, extra and regular, but it should include alternatives that would make transport fuels cheaper and environmentally safer, certainly methanol. I will elaborate on this topic in another post.

Top 10 worst world leaders

And Chavez make into this list. The Huffington Post forgot Fidel Castro.
vdebate reporter

Top 10 worst leaders according to THE HUFFINGTON POST.
The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/20/top-10-worst-world-leader_n_241456.html

N° 1. Kim Jong II De facto leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Il rules over the most secretive, closed-off country in the world. He often makes news with various bouts of saber-rattling, such as the recent alleged nuclear test, and with reports of human rights abuses and a starving population.
N° 2. Robert Mugabe Ruler of Zimbabwe since its founding in 1980 with the ousting of the white-minority ruled Rhodesian government. Mugabe has overseen the complete decimation of what was once one of Africa's strongest economies and is regularly criticized for human rights abuses, especially during the 2008 presidential campaign when his goons oversaw an intimidation campaign of torture and murder against supporters of Morgan Tsvangirai.
N° 3. Than Shwe Ruler of Burma's military junta since 1992, Shwe's true colors were revealed to the international community in the aftermath of Nargis when he prohibited rescue and aid groups from reaching cyclone victims.
N° 4. Ayatolah Alí Khamenei Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1989, Khamenei is widely considered the ultimate authority in a state that feigns democracy while brutalizing its own people when they dissent. Khamenei has brought a heavy hand down on protesters of the disputed June 12 presidential election and shows no sign of bending anytime soon.
N° 5. Muammar al-Quaddafi Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1989, Khamenei is widely considered the ultimate authority in a state that feigns democracy while brutalizing its own people when they dissent. Khamenei has brought a heavy hand down on protesters of the disputed June 12 presidential election and shows no sign of bending anytime soon.
N° 6. Hugo Chávez President of Venezuela since 1998, Chavez has incrementally aimed to consolidate his power through referendums and constitutional amendments. While he touts his socialist credentials, Chavez has cracked down more and more on dissenters--such as with his current campaign against the last remaining opposition TV channel Globovision. He is often criticized for harassing and unjustly prosecuting outspoken political opponents.
N° 7. Silvio Berlusconi On-and-off Prime Minister of Italy since 1994 and the third richest man in the country, Berlusconi frequents the international news media with various scandals that are usually centered around women. Berlusconi is currently going through a very public divorce from his wife Veronica Lario over his attendance to an 18-year-old girl's birthday party (he is 73), among other things. Among and endless selection of gaffes, Berlusconi once complimentred Barack Obama on his "suntan".
N° 8. Omar al-Bashir Ruler of Sudan since 1989, al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, namely in the Darfur region. Despite the warrant, he freely travels to sympathetic countries to flaunt his relative immunity among friends. 2.7 million people are believed to have been displaced since 2003 as a result of his military campaign against the Darfur rebels.
N° 9. Ju Jintao Paramount Leader of China and the Chinese Communist Party since 2002, Jintao often finds himself trapped between China's meteoric rise towards modernization and its history of harshly cracking down on dissent. The months leading up to the 2008 Beijing elections were reported to be particularly repressive against dissenters and the press, especially regarding Tibet. More recently, the Chinese state quelled violent Uighur-Han protests in Xinjiang province, leaving scores dead.
N° 10. King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud King of Saudi Arabia since 1995, Abdullah often presents himself as a reformist and peacemaker in the region while overseeing the most oppressive system against women in the world. Women's rights in Saudi Arabia remain so restricted that they must ask a male's permission to do basically anything, including working, studying, travelling, or marrying

The FARC's foreign friends - Mary O'grady

FARC & Chavez did everything possible to make look bad president Uribe, as the computer is showing now......
vdebate reporter

In other words, there is no peace agenda. Only plans for a circus designed to undermine Colombia's democracy. The rest of the region's governments ought to worry about who is next.

Mary O'grady

The FARC's Foreign Friends
by Mary O'grady

Some 11,000 text documents have been retrieved from the computers seized by the Colombian government after a bombing raid on a guerrilla camp in March. That raid killed rebel leader Raúl Reyes.Yet combing through only a portion of the material, which I did recently, is enough to see that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – the FARC – is held together by two common threads.

First is the globalization of the armed struggle.

The FARC's allies and suppliers come from places as far flung as Australia, China, Russia, the Middle East and all parts of Latin America. Some are ideological comrades – both inside governments and operating as illegal cells; others are members of organized crime networks. All are crucial actors in the FARC's bloodthirsty search for power.

The second common thread is the propaganda war.

FARC rebels not only assume that they can manipulate international opinion by claiming a "humanitarian" agenda. They count on it. All this is facilitated by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The Colombian military has been running up the score against the FARC of late and rebel operations are close to falling apart, as Journal reporter José de Cordoba wrote last week. But the documents show that aid from Mr. Chávez is prolonging the war by keeping FARC hopes alive.

The Venezuelan president has been creative in thinking about how he can help the rebels. The documents show that he has offered $250 million to $300 million but that's not all. In a February memo to the FARC high command, two rebel leaders who had recently met with Mr. Chávez describe proposed money-making schemes. "He offered us the possibility of a business in which we would receive a quota of oil to sell outside the country, which would leave us with a juicy profit."

There was also an offer of Venezuelan state contracts. In January 2007, the rebels penned a memo explaining that a Venezuelan general told them that arms shipments from abroad could be brought in through the Venezuelan port of Maracaibo.

By September, the shipments were being lined up. "Yesterday I received two Australian arms suppliers," one rebel wrote to the high command, "thanks to a contact made through Ramiro [a Salvadoran.]" The Aussies "offer very good prices on all we need."

The list includes 50-caliber machine guns, sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and missiles. "All of these materials are made in Russia and China," he wrote, and the shipment would take a month or so "to arrive in Venezuela."

Just in case all this military hardware doesn't maim and murder enough civilians to produce a surrender by the Colombian government, Mr. Chávez and the FARC also have been collaborating on Plan B: an effort to acquire legitimacy in the eyes of the international community by branding Colombian President Álvaro Uribe as heartless and unreasonable.

That was supposed to be a slam dunk after Mr. Chávez last year won the role of "mediator" in the effort to free some FARC hostages, including the French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt. But a series of PR faux-pas, culminating in a fruitless trip to see French President Nicolas Sarkozy, destroyed any credibility he may briefly have enjoyed as a peacemaker.

Shortly thereafter, rebel leaders wrote a memo outlining how they planned to position themselves as humanitarians ready to swap hostages for rebel prisoners "in contrast to the stubborn intransigence of Mr. Uribe."

Among their demands would be exclusion from the international terrorist list and access to diplomatic missions. "If [Mr. Uribe] rejects it, as he surely will," they wrote, "we lose nothing and instead he will remain isolated and under international pressure." That plan, too, went nowhere.

On Feb. 8 of this year, the rebels wrote that Mr. Chávez had a new idea: to create an international group – consisting of Cuba, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico and Nicaragua – similar to the Contadora Group. Contadora, which was formed in the 1980s allegedly to find a peaceful solution to the Central American wars, in fact provided political cover to the region's Marxists.

According to the rebels, Mr. Chávez said that if Mr. Uribe wants to improve bilateral relations, he would have to accept it and "asks that we bring Ingrid to the inaugural." In preparation for the swap, the group would set up a "humanitarian camp" with "the presence of the press, international delegates and the FARC." In other words, there is no peace agenda.

Only plans for a circus designed to undermine Colombia's democracy. The rest of the region's governments ought to worry about who is next.
http://www.hacer.org/report/2008/06/farcs-foreign-friends-by-mary-ogrady.html
Source/Fuente: http://www.wsj.com/