 Friday, February 8, 2002
|
After the Gulf War, it was my "pleasure" to see the cinemax film Fires of Kuwait at the IMAX theater at Great America in Santa Clara, California. This film shown on the 60 foot high by 90 wide screen (large enough to show a full sized whale) brought the struggle of those special firemen from Texas who put out oil well fires to the viewers consciousness in the most vivid way imaginable. I and many others walked out of the theater stunned. The torching of the Kuwait oil fields was a crime against Earth, Life and Rationality. Now controversial investigator Joe Vialls brings news of another fire, and reminds us how vulnerable the middle east is to adversity.
Kuwait Oil Explosion
Joe Vialls
Less than 48 hours after George Dubya had made his inane "Axis of Evil" address to the US Congress, a massive explosion rocked the northern Kuwaiti oilfield of Al-Rawdatayn, also known as "Al-Rawdhatain".
The blast destroyed Oil Gathering Center 3, Gas Booster 130, and the Al-Rawdatayn oilfield electrical sub-station. Four oil workers were killed outright, and another seventeen are being in treated in hospital for burns, some of them severe. Do not be fooled by the non-sequential numbers of the installations. All three units destroyed lie at the very heart of one of Kuwait's premier oilfields, and in addition act as a critical collecter for a significant portion of oil output from other lesser fields.
At a single stroke, Al-Rawdaytan's production capability of of 280,000 bpd (Barrels Per Day) was destroyed, with peripheral network damage reducing Kuwait's total oil exporting capability from 1.7 million bpd to 0.95 million bpd. Though export capability can be corrected in the short term by increasing flow from several other Kuwaiti fields, the long term look bleak.
If over-production of the other fields is sustained for too long, there is a high risk of "coning", where subsurface oil and water layers go into turbulent flow and then interface, damaging the fields even more than they were damaged during the Gulf War.
More
What is Operation Shekhinah ?
Joe Vialls
Risk assessment conducted in Tel Aviv showed there was still a high probability that continued ruthless Israeli activity in Palestine, would lead in turn to increased sanctions by the western nations. Initially the sanctions would take the form of decreased arms shipments to Israel, followed later by increasingly large cuts in overseas financial “aid”, still provided in the main by unwitting American taxpayers. Sooner or later financial aid might dry up completely, but this was not the worst case scenario.
Eventually, if western public opinion became strident enough, America and Europe might feel compelled to impose a complete oil embargo on Israel. With no natural resources of its own, and only limited strategic oil reserves in the country, Israel’s armed forces would grind to a complete standstill in only a few weeks. Aircraft and battle tanks have an almost insatiable thirst for petroleum products, and when those products run out, the aircraft and tanks are no more use to their owners than chunks of aluminum and steel waiting for the recycling smelters.
Clearly then, the Israeli Cabinet had to find an alternate source of oil, and find it quickly. Moreover, bearing in mind they would no longer be able to pay for the oil because of financial sanctions, the new source would have to be “free”. Back in the sixties, ambitious Israelis had made detailed plans to acquire just such an alternate source of oil by force, but the plans had to be shelved for geopolitical reasons. Those geopolitical restrictions no longer existed in 2001, so the old plans were taken out of storage, dusted off, and renamed Operation Shekhinah.
More
