Israel has oil but Obama refuses to allow trade with Israel since he claims it belongs to the Muslims.
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Oil found in Kenya by Anglo-Irish firm Tullow Oil
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/kenya/120326/kenya-oil-found-turkana-region-tullow-oil-announcement
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki announces discovery of oil in Kenya's Turkana region by Tullow Oil, an Anglo-Irish firm that also struck oil in neighboring Uganda.
News DeskMarch 26, 2012 12:55
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/kenya/120326/kenya-oil-found-turkana-region-tullow-oil-announcement
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki announces discovery of oil in Kenya's Turkana region by Tullow Oil, an Anglo-Irish firm that also struck oil in neighboring Uganda.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki announces discovery of oil in Kenya's Turkana region by Tullow Oil, an Anglo-Irish firm that also struck oil in neighboring Uganda.
Oil has been found in Kenya by Tullow Oil, an Anglo-Irish firm that also struck oil in neighboring Uganda.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki announced the landmark discovery today, but said the successful drilling of oil is still years away, the Daily Nation reported.
Energy Minister Kiraitu Murungi, who held a glass bottle of "light waxy crude oil" at a news conference, said that Kenya's oil deposits, which are in the Turkana region in the country's northwest, could be bigger than Uganda's, the newspaper reported.
"This is the first time Kenya has made such a discovery and it is very good news for our country," President Kibaki said.
"It is however the beginning of a long journey to make our country an oil producer, which typically takes in excess of three years. We shall be giving the nation more information as the oil exploration process continues," he explained.
More from GlobalPost: Tullow Oil to invest in Uganda's oil industry
Kibaki said Tullow will drill more wells to check the commercial viability of the oil discovery.
Reuters said shares in Tullow jumped 2.5 percent in London after the announcement of its oil find in Kenya.
"This is an excellent start to our major exploration campaign in the East African rift basins of Kenya and Ethiopia," said Angus McCoss, the company's exploration director, according to the BBC.
"To make a good oil discovery in our first well is beyond our expectations and bodes well for the material program ahead of us," he added.
Summary Box: Oil found in Kenya for first time
OIL IN KENYA: Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki said that oil
has been found, the first time that has ever happened in the East African
nation.
THE PLAY: Britain's Tullow Oil — which is carrying out oil exploration in the region — said that about 65 feet of net oil pay was discovered at a site called Ngamia-1 in Kenya's Turkana County.
BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING: Both Tullow and the nation's energy minister say it could be years before the country would see any monetary benefits, if there are any to be had at all. Oil was first discovered in neighboring Uganda in 2006 and has not yet reached the production stage.
© 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributedTHE PLAY: Britain's Tullow Oil — which is carrying out oil exploration in the region — said that about 65 feet of net oil pay was discovered at a site called Ngamia-1 in Kenya's Turkana County.
BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING: Both Tullow and the nation's energy minister say it could be years before the country would see any monetary benefits, if there are any to be had at all. Oil was first discovered in neighboring Uganda in 2006 and has not yet reached the production stage.
Kenya: Oil Found in Turkana
By Henry Wanyama and Solomon Kirimi, 26 March 2012
Oil has been discovered in Turkana North District by British company Tullow Oil in the first well it has drilled in Kenya.
The Tullow share price jumped by £97 to £1,570 (Sh201,000) per share yesterday, up 7 per cent, after the news was released. The oil deposits were found in Ngamia-1 exploration well block 10BB, located in a remote area off the road to Lokichar shopping centre.
According to Tullow Oil, the deposits have similar properties to the light waxy crude that it discovered in Uganda two years ago. "We are are yet to confirm whether the deposits are of commercial quantities because we are just in the initial stages of drilling at 1,041 metres deep. The well will now be drilled to a depth of approximately 2,700 metres before we confirm within the next few months," said Tim O'Hanlon, Tullow Oil vice president for Africa yesterday.He was addressing a press conference at the Energy ministry.
O'Hanlon said Tullow had identified ten more similar prospects in the Rift Valley basin. He said they struck oil in a record two months despite the difficult terrain. "This is an excellent start to our major exploration campaign in the East African rift basins of Kenya. To make a good oil discovery in our first well is beyond our expectations and bodes well for the material programme ahead of us," he said.
Turkana county is one of seven basins mapped in Tullow's 100,000 square kilometre exploration area in Kenya and Ethiopia. Tullow found oil with an estimated extractable potential of 2 billion barrels in its 9,000 square kilometre exploration area in the Lake Albert Rift basin in Uganda. "I wish to make an important announcement to the nation. This morning, I have been informed by the Minister for Energy that our country has made a major breakthrough in oil exploration," President Kibaki told the nation yesterday.
Oil exploration in Kenya started the1930s without discoveries of commercial reserves. Kibaki pointed out that it typically takes three years for a viable oil deposits to translate into a country becoming an oil producer. Energy minister Kiraitu Murungi said this positions Kenyan as a potential oil and gas exporter. The seismic data indicates there may be several oil fields in the basin and huge quantities of oil.
He said the the Energy act will be reviewed to accommodate the provisions for resource sharing in the new constitution. He said there will be a revenue sharing agreement that will first benefit the host community, then the national government and then Tullow and other multinationals. "In most of the workshops we attend, they have themes asking whether oil is a blessing or curse, but this is a major blessing to the people of Turkana and Kenya. It would be a shame if Turkana, a major poverty zone does not benefit from oil as the host community," Murungi said.
Tullow has been allocated seven inland and one offshore blocks out of the 38 distributed among licensees. Tullow operates block 10A where they struck oil, 10BA 10BB block 13T as well as 12A and 12B in North and Western Kenya. Last year Chinese company CNOOC raised hopes after finding gas in Isiolo but it later proved to be insignificant. Several companies have drilled in the past but there was a lull in the 1980s and 1990s until the new blocks were allocated.
Oil exploration activities are mainly in Northern Kenya. There is an ongoing oil drilling at Bubisa in Marsabit North district. There are also thought to be substantial offshore gas deposits running all the way from Mozambique to Somalia. International companies are particularly interested in the Lamu sector. Tanzania and Mozambique are already exporting their gas deposits.
The Tullow share price jumped by £97 to £1,570 (Sh201,000) per share yesterday, up 7 per cent, after the news was released. The oil deposits were found in Ngamia-1 exploration well block 10BB, located in a remote area off the road to Lokichar shopping centre.
According to Tullow Oil, the deposits have similar properties to the light waxy crude that it discovered in Uganda two years ago. "We are are yet to confirm whether the deposits are of commercial quantities because we are just in the initial stages of drilling at 1,041 metres deep. The well will now be drilled to a depth of approximately 2,700 metres before we confirm within the next few months," said Tim O'Hanlon, Tullow Oil vice president for Africa yesterday.He was addressing a press conference at the Energy ministry.
O'Hanlon said Tullow had identified ten more similar prospects in the Rift Valley basin. He said they struck oil in a record two months despite the difficult terrain. "This is an excellent start to our major exploration campaign in the East African rift basins of Kenya. To make a good oil discovery in our first well is beyond our expectations and bodes well for the material programme ahead of us," he said.
Turkana county is one of seven basins mapped in Tullow's 100,000 square kilometre exploration area in Kenya and Ethiopia. Tullow found oil with an estimated extractable potential of 2 billion barrels in its 9,000 square kilometre exploration area in the Lake Albert Rift basin in Uganda. "I wish to make an important announcement to the nation. This morning, I have been informed by the Minister for Energy that our country has made a major breakthrough in oil exploration," President Kibaki told the nation yesterday.
Oil exploration in Kenya started the1930s without discoveries of commercial reserves. Kibaki pointed out that it typically takes three years for a viable oil deposits to translate into a country becoming an oil producer. Energy minister Kiraitu Murungi said this positions Kenyan as a potential oil and gas exporter. The seismic data indicates there may be several oil fields in the basin and huge quantities of oil.
He said the the Energy act will be reviewed to accommodate the provisions for resource sharing in the new constitution. He said there will be a revenue sharing agreement that will first benefit the host community, then the national government and then Tullow and other multinationals. "In most of the workshops we attend, they have themes asking whether oil is a blessing or curse, but this is a major blessing to the people of Turkana and Kenya. It would be a shame if Turkana, a major poverty zone does not benefit from oil as the host community," Murungi said.
Tullow has been allocated seven inland and one offshore blocks out of the 38 distributed among licensees. Tullow operates block 10A where they struck oil, 10BA 10BB block 13T as well as 12A and 12B in North and Western Kenya. Last year Chinese company CNOOC raised hopes after finding gas in Isiolo but it later proved to be insignificant. Several companies have drilled in the past but there was a lull in the 1980s and 1990s until the new blocks were allocated.
Oil exploration activities are mainly in Northern Kenya. There is an ongoing oil drilling at Bubisa in Marsabit North district. There are also thought to be substantial offshore gas deposits running all the way from Mozambique to Somalia. International companies are particularly interested in the Lamu sector. Tanzania and Mozambique are already exporting their gas deposits.
US-backed Kenyan forces invade Somalia
By Eddie Haywood
26 October 2011
Al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage warned Kenya: “We know fighting more than you and defeated other invaders before... We shall inflict on you the same damage you inflicted on us. You have to see what happened to the other aggressors, like [Ugandan President Yoweri] Museveni and his country when they invaded us. We hit them in their country.”
The intervention by Kenyan military forces was requested and welcomed by the US-backed Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu. Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Omar Osman said: “The governments of Kenya and Somalia are now cooperating in the fight against al Shabaab, which is an enemy of both countries.”
US officials said last week that they have been pressuring Kenya to “do something” in response to a string of security incidents along the Kenya-Somalia border, while at the same time maintaining that the Kenyan invasion into Somalia caught them by surprise.
Claims that the US was surprised by Kenya’s incursion are preposterous. It has CIA listening posts in Kenya and a military base in nearby Djibouti monitoring regional troop movements via satellite.
On October 19—just three days after the advance into Somalia by Kenyan troops—the US launched two aerial drone attacks near Kismayo, an al-Shabaab stronghold located in the coastal area of southern Somalia, and in Musa Haji. According to Iran’s Press TV, some 64 people were reported killed in the twin attacks and many others injured. Numerous sightings of military aircraft have been reported in recent days over southern Somalia. This suggests that the US is providing coordinated air support for advancing Kenyan forces.
On October 23, the French Navy also reportedly bombarded the town of Kuday, near Kismayo.
The same day, US Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration said Washington “would go out of its way to help Kenya restore its territorial integrity” and that the US “respected Kenya’s decision to go into Somalia to rout out Al-Shabaab militants.”
The border region of Kenya and Somalia has been wracked by militant violence and criminal activities over the last two decades. The history of al-Shabaab is bound up with the long and sordid history of interventions and proxy wars planned by US imperialism and its allies over the past 20 years.
In the Cold War era Washington supported the dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre with arms and money to counter Soviet influence on the continent. The dictatorship was overthrown in 1991 by clan-based forces led by Mohamed Farrah Aidid. Washington invaded Somalia in 1992, though the Clinton administration subsequently pulled US troops out in March of 1994 amid rising US casualties and popular opposition in Somalia to the American intervention.
Washington switched tactics to relying on proxy military forces—initially clan-based Somali warlords hostile to Aidid, and later proxy forces from Ethiopia or other African Union (AU) member nations. The TFG, placed in Mogadishu in 2004 with US blessing, has little popular support in Somalia. The chaos that ensued after the overthrow of the US-backed dictatorship in 1991 has continued up to the present, as the TFG’s attempts to impose its authority by military repression have failed.
The Islamic Courts Union (ICU) developed as a judiciary system and then a fighting force in this political vacuum in Somalia. It was reportedly backed by Eritrea. It challenged the US-backed TFG warlords for power, briefly capturing Mogadishu in street fighting in 2006.
The US responded by backing an Ethiopian invasion to crush the ICU and return the TFG to power. It also began regularly bombing Somalia and mounting naval operations along the Somali coast.
Al-Shabaab was formed in 2006 as an offshoot of the ICU after the ICU splintered into several smaller groups following its removal from power by Ethiopian invaders.
AMISOM, the African Union’s military force sponsored by the US and the UN, took over control of security from Ethiopian forces in 2007. It includes 9,000 troops from Uganda and Burundi. Its operational mandate is to prop up the TFG in Mogadishu by using military force against al-Shabaab and other militant groups.
Kenyan forces now in Somalia augment the AMISOM forces. Kenyan Foreign Affairs Minister Moses Wetangula went to Mogadishu last week as part of a delegation of Kenyan officials to discuss the invasion with his Somali counterparts and AU Commission Chairman Jean Ping. Wetangula told the media: “We also briefed the chairman of the AU on the events occurring on the Kenya-Somalia frontier and he fully appreciated and further voiced AU’s full support to Kenya in whatever endeavor we take to defend our territory for the sake of peace and security of our people.”
Kenya’s incursion into Somalia is part of a broader campaign by the US and other Western powers to reassert their imperialist interests on the continent and counter the rising influence of their global rivals, particularly China. The latter’s deepening integration into the global economy has seen its emergence as a major economic power in Africa, heightening concerns in Washington that China could threaten its hegemony on the continent.
In 2008, the Pentagon established its AFRICOM command, reflecting preparations for military intervention in Africa by the US and the NATO powers. These interventions now include the US-led war in Libya, the French-led overthrow of Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo in April, and the recent deployment of US troops to the Central African region. US Special Forces are deploying to the Congo, Uganda, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.
The imperialist takeover of Libya by the US and its European NATO allies underscores the threat to the toiling masses of Africa. The indiscriminate bombing of Libyan cities and the murder of Muammar Gaddafi send a sinister message to any political force that contemplates defying US imperialism’s power grab in Africa.
This imperialist scramble for strategic advantage and key economic resources plays a central role in the current fighting in Somalia.
Somalia—with its more than 1,000-mile coastline overlooking the navigation routes of oil-bearing vessels traversing the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea—is both strategically and economically vital to the world economy. US imperialism aims to dominate this vast waterway, which transports much of the world’s oil, particularly Persian Gulf oil headed to European markets. The US not only intervenes in Somalia, but maintains together with France a military base in Djibouti, near the straits connecting the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea.
There are also several recently discovered deposits of oil in nearby countries, including Uganda and South Sudan. An oil pipeline is slated for construction to transport oil to Mombasa, a port on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast. The proposed pipeline would run from a refinery in Kampala, Uganda and meet a projected pipeline coming from newly independent South South Sudan to traverse northern Kenya and end in Mombasa.
China’s state-owned oil companies are among the investors lining up to exploit both Uganda’s and South Sudan’s oil deposits.
The planned oil pipeline passes through the unstable regions in northern Kenya where the Kenyan government alleges al Shabaab attacks have occurred.
U.S. Denies Assisting Kenyan Forces Against Shebab
Nov. 16, 2011 - 06:00AM |
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE |
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon said Shebab militants in Somalia being targeted by Kenyan troops are getting what they "deserve" but insisted the U.S. military was not assisting Kenya's campaign against the al-Qaida-linked rebels.
"I'm not going to get into what other countries are doing or not doing but al-Shebab is a very serious terrorist threat and particularly in the region," press secretary George Little told reporters Nov. 16.
"And pressure that's brought to bear against them is something they deserve," he said.
Since Kenyan forces moved into southern Somalia to go after Shebab militants a month ago, U.S. officials have adopted a reserved stance in public comments on the incursion - although Washington has long portrayed the Islamist Shebab extremists as a dangerous threat.
Despite speculation about Western assistance to Kenya, Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby said the American military was providing no help to the Kenyan forces.
"We've been certainly monitoring their (Kenyan) military operations in southern Somalia," Kirby said. "We haven't taken a view or expressed an opinion about that but we're certainly monitoring that.
"And we're not providing any aid or assistance to that effort," he told the same news conference.
Kenya's U.N. envoy on Nov. 15 sought to promote American support for his country's offensive during a visit to Washington, saying the United States and other countries should do their part to counter the militants.
"We would love to see the international community, with the U.S. right up there, engaging in Somalia in ways in which they have not for quite a long time," Ambassador Macharia Kamau told AFP in an interview.
Kamau also said the United States should consider imposing a naval blockade on the rebel-held Somali port of Kismayo to choke off the rebels' supply lines, a move Washington has been reluctant to support.
A series of kidnappings of foreigners on Kenyan soil and incursions by Shebab, who control much of southern Somalia, triggered Kenya's unprecedented offensive.
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