This was not a singular event in the history of Nigeria, the world's eighth largest exporter of petroleum. No, Tuesday's blast at a bus stop in Awori, a suburb of Nigeria's commercial capital Lagos, was symptomatic of the paradoxes of oil-rich countries.
While the country is rich, the people are poor. Fuel unites them, but the petrodollars seldom trickle down.
Nigeria's Vanguard newspaper posted the following headline to its website Wednesday:
"Scarcity: 200 roast in Lagos pipeline fire"
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Rethinking Supply Security
The term "supply security" has been tossed around a lot in recent years, primarily by governments seeking to maintain the public appearance of plenty in the age of Peak Oil. The European Union has sought to harness Russia's wily Gazprom, which holds Europe by the horns as it holds a monopoly on Russian natural gas exports.
But in the name of domestic supply security, France, Germany and Italy have signed bilateral deals with the Muscovite machine, thus forsaking the European Energy Charter Treaty and its guidelines for continental cooperation.
But there is a micro level to this macro problem. The geopolitics of energy resources finds its roots in geology, and then in geography. Nigeria, along with more prolific producers like Iran, churns out a bounty of oil every day, but refined oil products are scarce enough to cause riots whenever a saboteur (or entrepreneur) bores a hole in the transit tubes.
Joseph Akintola, photo editor of the Vanguard, described the scene at the site of the pipeline rupture, where he arrived just before the conflagration:
"On getting to Awori Bus Stop, I saw hundreds of people carrying Jerry cans of different sizes containing fuel that they had scooped. They had iron and plastic buckets and other plastic bowls to scoop the fuel and with the aid of funnel, fill-in their Jerry cans. From a distance, I could see fuel was gushing out with a very heavy force. I could see inflammable materials like planks, very close to the burst pipe. I had not walked up to five metres when I heard explosion, gbua! I looked back and I saw a very strong and thick fire coming behind and I took to my heels. I would have died there."
The threat of siphoning is always present when above-ground pipelines run through economically depressed areas where opportunists can turn a profit on bootleg petrol, or in regions like the Niger Delta where militant groups can easily act against their oil industry targets with the firepower of a Fourth-of-July celebration.
You Can Bury the Conduit, but Not the Conflict
The tension between petroleum profits and the populace will only increase with each added dollar of revenue that a barrel can generate.
Leverage is universal, and it threatens supply security at every level.
Russia awarded contracts with extremely favorable terms to oil majors during the country's trudge uphill after the USSR collapsed. The Kremlin had to sweeten production sharing agreements in order to entice the likes of Shell and BP to take on any exploration and production costs during a period of cheap oil sale prices.
Similarly, governments in the Bolivarian Alternative group, the Latin American cadre spearheaded by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, are forcing renegotiation on their commercial production partners. These oil and gas companies, clamoring for the capacity to replace dwindling reserves in the world's largest hydrocarbon deposits, agree sheepishly, further empowering inefficient and poorly supervised national operations.
In Nigeria, inefficiency and poor maintenance have proven deadly. Prior to Tuesday's blast in Lagos, another 2006 pipeline fire killed 150 and a monumental inferno in 1998 took the lives of 1500 Nigerians. President Olusegun Obasanjo is also the country's oil minister.
The fractious Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union has seen a showdown this year very near the route of the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) pipeline. The BTC line, which was inaugurated early this summer, was buried underground as insurance against saboteurs from the Georgian breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies within Azerbaijan's boundaries.
The surface of the matter would lead us to believe that moving the pipeline away from the surface of the earth eliminates risk. More likely, it just shifts it. As pipelines are prone to corrosion, leaks can harm groundwater, including Georgia's precious mineral water and wine resources (some 15% of its GDP).
If the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation found a way tomorrow to magically push its ducts underneath the shantytowns and oil-slicked tribal lands within that country, there would still be a massive imbalance of resource wealth.
News reports of the Boxing Day blaze conflict as to whether the original leak was natural and taken advantage of by thieves, or whether it was caused by the vandals originally. In either case, without significant improvements a little spark is all that's needed to set the fires roaring again.
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