Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil | 
| Author: John Ghazvinian
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 37174
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0156033720
Dewey Decimal Number: 382
EAN: 9780156033725
ASIN: 0156033720
Publication Date: April 14, 2008
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Condition: brand new, never read, perfect condition- part of proceeds go towards classroom library. We now ship with 100% RECYCLABLE mailers.
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Product Description
Although Africa has long been known to be rich in oil, extracting it hadn’t seemed worth the effort and risk until recently. But with the price of Middle Eastern crude oil skyrocketing and advancing technology making reserves easier to tap, the region has become the scene of a competition between major powers that recalls the nineteenth-century scramble for colonization there. But what does this giddy new oil boom mean—for America, for the world, for Africans themselves?
John Ghazvinian traveled through twelve African countries—from Sudan to Congo to Angola—talking to warlords, industry executives, bandits, activists, priests, missionaries, oil-rig workers, scientists, and ordinary people whose lives have been transformed—not necessarily for the better—by the riches beneath their feet. The result is a high-octane narrative that reveals the challenges, obstacles, reasons for despair, and reasons for hope emerging from the world’s newest energy hot spot.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Barnstorming Africa's Oil Fields June 26, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Ghazvinian has taken on an interesting topic in an intense way, and I salute him for that. Here is a well-traveled and (by all appearances) well-educated author who took the time and made the effort to visit a handful of African nations to get an inside look at "the scramble" he describes in his subtitular reference. The undertaking could not have been an easy one, and I think the effort deserves respect and the derived opinions merit attention.
Further, he backs up his frequent flyer mileage with a solid historical analysis of the shifting political and social atmospheres in his target countries. One wouldn't expect much less from an Oxford man, but the research is impeccable and Ghazvinian's narrative reveals an author who is very comfortable with -- at least historically -- his subject.
The let down for me was in the book's overall organization and approach. Needless to say, there is not much sympathy for or effort at presenting the "development" side of the coin. I am in energy, and find that this is often the problem in discussions of the impact of energy production -- particularly in the extraction side of the business. Everyone can see the environmental, social and other impacts -- but no one cares to consider the alternative to a world without our prevailing energy models in place.
Allow me an anecdotal example, at one point in the barnstorming tour of Africa, the author makes some lament about "sporadic electricity," and at another he bemoans a nation's "lack of infrastructure." It is in these moments when the work's biases emerge and there seems to be ignorance or unwillingness to allow that the benefits of these relatively common Western amenities are prized in their absence while their impacts - in the same absence - are taken for granted. It would be enormously complex and disruptive to establish sophisticated electrical infrastructure or to construct transnational highways. These projects offer many of the same challenges logistically, politically, socially and environmentally that are set out as a scourge on Africans as part of oil extraction.
I suppose another possible excuse is that Ghazvinian did not or could not get access to oil execs and PR folks weren't willing to do much talking. To that I would reply that if one is able to insert themselves into Sudanese opposition militias, then it should be no great challenge to get a sit down with a couple of oil company mouthpieces.
Also, I think Ghazvinian got a little lazy in assembling the book as a series of vignettes about his visits to nations around the western sub-Saharan portion of the continent. There are obvious benefits to that approach, but given the often kaleidoscopic political histories of the nations he visits, I was longing for a more over-arching approach that divided the analysis into a more clearly comparative style organized by unifying themes -- my preferred organizing principle would have been geopolitical chronology.
I still admire Ghazvinian for the effort, but I think the purity of his journalistic motives lost out to the overwhelming force of his moral ones.
 Great book, interesting from start to end May 29, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
A very good book, utterly necessary to understand todays trends on Oil politics, problems and the companies involved in this business. Africa is the center of attention these days, everybody is hungry for oil and this book shows what is happening in some countries of this continent, such as Nigeria, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Angola, Sudan and others. The author travelled to all these countries to see with his own eyes the current situation, all the poverty, corruption and the scars of recent devastating wars and most importantly, the effect that Oil has produced on the country and its people. He explain why Oil's revenues have been more a curse than a bless, you will read about the Dutch desease and "rentier states" and how China have made feel its presence there. This is my second book on Africa and I still wonder "what is wrong with these people".
 Untapped March 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
In the scramble for the world's resources, and primarily oil, this book is a valuable resource. Africa is the next Iraq.
Riveting in-depth look at African oil March 2, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
_Untapped_ by John Ghazvinian is a riveting in-depth look at the rising importance of African oil. In recent years formerly poor countries, of little importance in the global economy, were suddenly awash in oil money (one, Equatorial Guinea used to be of so little importance to the U.S. that the American embassy had been closed; now it was about to reopen). The U.S. was soon expected to get as much as 25% of its imported oil from sub-Saharan Africa and China was becoming increasingly reliant on African crude. Ghazvinian traveled through twelve African countries to discover the reasons behind the boom and what this means for Africa and the world.
So why is African oil booming? Some experts believe that at best Africa only has 10% of the world's proven oil resources, so why the many billions of dollars spent on investment there? Much African oil (particularly offshore oil in the Gulf of Guinea, the 90-degree bend in the west coast of Africa) is of high quality, crude that is "light" (viscous) and "sweet" (low in sulfur), making it cheaper to refine than Middle Eastern crude. Not only is it cheaper to refine, it is less environmental costly to refine.
African crude is also easier and cheaper to transport. Most of Africa is surrounded by water, which cuts transport-related risks and costs; indeed offshore oil from the Gulf of Guinea is already well-positioned for quick and safe transport to major markets. Little need for any expensive, politically-difficult to negotiate, and vulnerable pipelines such as what are needed to bring Caspian crude to market. In the few cases were pipelines are needed they often only have to run through only one or maybe two countries.
Another reason for the attractiveness of Africa is that African nations generally present a more favorable contractual environment for oil companies to operate in. Unlike in Middle Eastern nations where state-owned oil companies often have a monopoly on oil exploration, production, and distribution, most sub-Saharan African nations operate on production-sharing agreements (or PSAs), an arrangement in which foreign oil companies are awarded licenses, assume all up-front costs for exploration and production, and share the revenues with the nation in question only after initial costs have been recouped.
Yet another reason is that with the exception of Nigeria (though others may soon join), sub-Saharan African nations were not members of OPEC (and thus not subject to their strict limits on oil output).
The "most attractive of all the attributes of Africa's oil boom" has been that most new oil discoveries have been made in deepwater reserves, many miles from populated land (or indeed land at all), meaning that they are pretty much isolated from the dangers of civil war, insurrection, sabotage, or banditry (an increasing problem for oil production from the Niger Delta in Nigeria, which the author covers in depth, revealing such innovative crimes as "illegal bunkering," "local bunkering," and "trucking").
A dominant theme of the book is just what this oil will mean for Africa. Many scholars and humanitarian activists view the oil boom not as blessing but rather a curse. Dubbed the "paradox of plenty" or the "resource curse," time and again throughout the world where oil has been discovered in a developing country that country has seen its standard of living decline and its people suffer in comparison to its non-oil endowed neighbors (their economies generally growing four times faster than oil-generating countries).
Though at first an "oil curse" seems counterintuitive, the author presented a well-argued case for its existence. Though the discovery of oil can bring about political and military conflict (such as exacerbating ethnic tensions in the Niger Delta), by and large the problem of oil is one of economic degradation. Ghazvinian cited an example from economics labeled the "Dutch disease," a term coined by the _Economist_ in 1977 to describe the collapse of the Dutch manufacturing sector after the discovery of Dutch natural gas in the 1960s. Basically, when a country starts to export a valuable natural commodity to the international market, it finds itself flooded in foreign currency. This glut artificially inflates the value of that nation's own currency, making imported products suddenly cheaper (which are also often perceived to be of better quality). Local producers (in Africa often this means local farmers) find that fewer people buy their products, so they abandon rural areas to flock to cities, creating a mass urban migration that devastates a country's traditional farms and small cottage industries. Of course, with this collapse, those in the city becoming increasingly reliant on imported foreign goods, something that is unfortunately out of reach to the new urban arrivals; a country that was once a net exporter of food often becomes a net importer of food. If and when the oil runs out, a nation's currency quickly depreciates, meaning its people are no longer able to buy now-expensive foreign imports and there is now no longer any local industry to speak of to fall back on.
An additional danger for oil producers is the development of a "rentier state." Rentier states are countries in which most if not all of the state's income comes from some form of economic rent (in this case a percentage of oil revenues). Such nations develop governments that in essence act like wealthy landlords, content to sit back and collect income from foreign corporations, divorcing the government and its management of the economy from the daily needs and activities of the people. Politicians no longer have any reasons to encourage industry and the government is no longer reliant on the economic productivity of its citizens but rather itself becomes instead a source of wealth. The state becomes an "allocation state," in which the government is seen as a big "sugar daddy," a source of free money. Where citizens pay taxes, they care about corruption and cronyism, while in a rentier state they view public funds as something open to all (often the elites, who make billions disappear).
Outstanding Work on an Important Topic December 6, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am just beginning to read about Africa's oil wealth and found this book to be an excellent introduction to the topic. In addition to explaining what goes in the major oil producing countries in Africa, the book gives insightful background into the histories of theses nations and their economies. Additionally, it provides explanations of some economic concepts. However, one of the best things about it is that you don't have to be interested in oil or economics to enjoy the book. It's written with wonderful style and has the tone of a trip diary, which gives it an entertaining aspect as well.
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