International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation

Energy and Security: From Conflict to Cooperation

Jürgen Scheffran and Clifford Singer

The link between energy and security is not self-evident. While energy is connected to natural science and engineering, security is a political term, aiming for the absence of threat and the prevention of dangers to human life and society. Physical power, which is the rate of energy use, can be used productively, by supporting life and wealth, or destructively, by inflicting damage to life and the environment. Access to physical power sometimes transforms into political power. Thus, the link between energy and security is multifaceted:

Energy security demands a sufficient energy flow to ensure the wealth desired by human beings and society, while the lack of sufficient energy flow is perceived as a threat that needs to be prevented.

Energy has a direct impact on security if states take military action to “protect” their energy-related interests by use of force, leading to wars over fossil fuels.

Wars, civil wars, and other forms of conflict or social disruption can impede access to energy resources.

The energy system itself may cause risks and conflicts, e.g. by having disaster potential or polluting the environment, globally or regionally.

The energy system and its various components are potentially vulnerable to attack by non-state actors as well as by national armies.

The discussion of which energy path to take can turn into serious conflicts and struggles within or between countries, companies, and citizens.

On the positive side, energy use as well as the prevention of risks and conflicts can be a field for international cooperation and global security.

Thus, lack of energy, its use and misuse, and its side effects can impair the security of individuals, groups, nations, and mankind. Conversely, the state of security can have an impact on energy access, distribution, and use. This interaction is particularly evident in the Middle East where the quest for oil is linked to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In the following we explore energy-security links. The news box shows that both many of today’s conflicts and areas of international cooperation are in one or the other way linked to energy.

Fossil Wars: Obsolete Concepts and Historical Inertia

The idea that there are likely threats to oil imports that are strategically critical to developed countries persists through historical inertia and is used to leverage domestic political contests. History provides examples of catastrophic consequences of launching wars based on obsolete concepts. These include the quest for historical prestige (in the origins of the Franco-Prussian War and First World War) and Lebensraum (in the origins of the European and Asian theaters in WWII). Energy resources explicitly entered the international security scene during the Franco-Prussian War, when the commandeering of the Lorraine iron fields by Germany set the stage for WWI and WWII.

Germany and Japan precipitated WWII by attacks supported by an ideology of expanding Lebensraum. In the nineteenth century in Europe and long before in Japan, population pressure and the financial needs of monarchies had made control of large land areas important. By the 1930s, declining fertility rates had made the pursuit of Lebensraum obsolete, but the historical inertia of the concept continued to provide its proponents with domestic political leverage.

Historically, the strategic importance of access to oil imports dates to the conversion of the British naval fleet to oil starting just before WWI, and there has been Anglo-American cooperation on projecting military power in the Persian Gulf region ever since. After WWII, the harsh winter of 1949 convinced the United States that continuity of oil supplies to Western Europe was needed to avoid more upheaval and the need for yet another massive U.S. intervention there. At this time, the Western Hemisphere was self sufficient in oil, so the U.S. interest was in buttressing Europe’s traditional sphere of influence rather than ensuring continuity in Western Hemisphere oil production. The United States intervened over oil nationalization in Iran as early as 1953, and gradually took over Britain’s force projection role after the post-1956 British retrenchment from East of Suez. This first involved supporting Israel as a military ally in the Middle East while the United States was pre-occupied with Vietnam, and then directly positioning U.S. military equipment in the Gulf region.

The critical role of oil in WWII military operations cemented the idea that secure oil supplies are strategically essential. This view was reinforced when the oil-dependent countries were hit by the Yom-Kippur War in October 1973 and the following oil crisis, which came together with price increases of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and a world-wide recession. Western countries took countermeasures, and in 1974 the International Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was initiated with the encouragement of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The U.S. policy that then evolved is reflected in a summary of the “Carter Doctrine” from the President’s 1980 “State of the Union” address:^[1] “An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” The Carter Doctrine was explicitly broadened to cover potential regional as well as external control over oil resources in President Clinton’s 1996 National Security Strategy document:

“There are three basic categories of national interests that can merit use of our armed forces. The first involves America’s vital interests, that is, interests that are of broad, overriding importance to the survival and vitality of our national identity—the defense of U.S. territory, citizens, and allies and our economic well-being. We will do whatever it takes to defend these interests, including – when necessary – the unilateral and decisive use of military power. This was demonstrated clearly in the Persian Gulf through Desert Storm and, more recently, Vigilant Warrior, when Iraq threatened aggression against Kuwait in October 1994.”^[2]

Note that the United States did not have a formal alliance with Kuwait before Iraq attacked it in 1990, and the defense of U.S. territory and citizens was not an issue. Thus the justification cited in this quote for Operation Desert Storm is evidently related to economic well-being as a vital national interest (i.e., oil). The Iran-Iraq and Kuwait wars were fought explicitly over control of oil resources, but also gave ruling factions in all of the participating Gulf states an excuse for maintaining rule by nondemocratic regimes.

The idea of years-long war over access to oil as a critical military supply becomes increasingly obsolete. Subsequent developments made access to cheap Persian Gulf oil much less economically important. These developments included a dramatic decline in the oil intensity of economic production after 1973, the diversification of accessible oil suppliers after the Soviet collapse, and evolving mass production capacity for much more fuelefficient hybrid automotive engines as well as other alternative forms of energy supply.

How Long Will the Fossil Age Last?

Since the end of the nineteenth century, coal has been increasingly replaced by oil as a cheap and abundant energy resource that can be easily transported over great distances and stored over a nearly unlimited time period. Increasingly, natural gas is taking over as a more environmental friendly but harder to transport fossil energy. Because it depends on finite resources, the era of cheap fossil fuels will come to its end. Extrapolating the current supply rates into the future, the periods for exhaustion of resources extractable with current technology and levels of capital and labor per unit energy production are given as 42 years for oil, 65 years for gas and 169 years for coal.^[3] Barring any major new developments in extraction technology, some think that as much as half of the oil that will ever be used has already been exhausted.^[4] In any case, we appear to be approaching a situation where the rate of learning how to extract oil more efficiently is being outpaced by the depletion of more readily extractable resources.

While the living conditions in the industrialized world have been associated with high energy consumption, the per capita energy consumption in the developing world is much lower, exacerbating deprivation that itself can in some cases lead to conflict. If in the coming years large energy consumers like China and India increase their oil imports, the increased competition for oil will push up international oil prices and further impede development in even poorer countries.

A key problem with fossil fuels is their unbalanced geographical distribution, which makes oil an issue for geopolitics.^[5] The largest reserves of fluid fossil fuels are located in crisis regions where the dependence of a few producers in the so-called “Strategic Ellipse,“ stretching from the Middle East to Central Asia, intensifies a new “Great Game“ over political influence in this region. Currently identified oil reserves are concentrated in the Middle East (ca. 67%), natural gas in the successor states of the former Soviet Union (43%) and the Middle East (29%), and overall resources extractable at the high 2004 price levels may be similarly concentrated.

Some industrialized countries, led by the United States, still have a policy of trying to enforce the access to these resources by a variety of means, including use of the military. In the Middle East, where a complex web of conflicts is rolling between Jews, Palestinians, neighboring Arabs, and the West, the link between energy, violence by non-state actors, war, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is most prominent. This is vividly shown by the Iraq wars. Iran’s nuclear program is facilitated by Iran’s oil sales and may be seen as a hedge against other powers’ quest for oil, but in return became a primary source of the security concerns that the same program hedges against.

Besides the Middle East, the oilrich republics of the former Soviet Union are also striven by conflict.^[6] Their estimated oil resources are comparable with those of the United States and the North Sea, and their natural gas reserves are even larger. There are conflicts over the best transport routes (especially pipelines), the legal status of the Caspian Sea, U.S. sanctions against Iran, and finally the bloody war over Chechen independence.

Oil Dependence and US Power Projections

Since domestic U.S. oil production is in a long-term decline and at the same time the U.S. demand for oil increases, the United States is increasing its dependence on oil imports. With more than 25% of global crude oil consumption, the United States is the world’s biggest energy consumer, with more than half imported. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, by the year 2020 expected U.S. oil import rates may increase by two thirds. Part of this oil would be delivered from oil fields in Latin America, Africa, Russia, and the Caspian Region, but the largest share is expected from the Gulf Region. With an estimated reserves of 113 billion barrels, Iraq is second behind Saudi-Arabia (262 billion barrels), which owns more than 25% of worldwide oil reserves and produces 40% of its GDP in the oil business. (Seven barrels corresponds to about one metric ton.) Together with Iran, Kuwait, and the United Arabic Emirates, these countries control more than two third of the world’s known oil reserves.

The Bush government has given oil a high priority in energy security^[7] and sees dependence on oil imports as a security problem: “A fundamental imbalance between supply and demand defines our nation’s energy crisis. As the chart illustrates, if energy production increases at the same rate as during the last decade our projected energy needs will far outstrip expected levels of production. This imbalance, if allowed to continue, will inevitably undermine our economy, our standard of living, and our national security.”^[8] Not surprisingly, the primary focus is on the Middle East): “By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world oil security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy, but our engagement will be global, spotlighting existing and emerging regions that will have a major impact on the global energy balance.”^[9]

The security implications of U.S. oil dependence are highlighted by the recent wars in the Gulf region. The 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was apparently motivated by a desire to demonstrate the transformative power of U.S. military force. It is not accidental that an oil-rich country was chosen for this demonstration, rather than countries that had developed and exported nuclear and missile technology (Pakistan or North Korea), a historically repressive and meddlesome regime not party to the Chemical Weapons Convention (Syria), or weaker countries violating human rights on a large scale (such as Sudan). The huge costs of the war of several hundred billion of dollars cannot be economically justified by the improved access to oil. Indeed, the invasion was followed by prolonged disruption of Iraqi oil and near record inflation prices for crude oil. A political unit such as the U.S. government does not act like an economic entity, however, those corporations do which profit from the war as well from rebuilding Iraq. As long as enough voters can be convinced of the acceptability of the war then they accept its cost.

Climate Change and Global Security

The environmental risks of fossil energy use can hardly be ignored. Coal mining changes the landscape and spoils ground water, and burning coal emits acid pollutants, photochemical substances and greenhouse gases. Oil may have less impact on climate, but still pollutes water, soil, and the atmosphere, sometimes with disastrous consequences if an oil transport ship sinks. Compared to the other fossils, natural gas is less polluting, even though transport and use bear dangers of explosive accidents, in particular for liquefied natural gas (LNG). Over-dependence on mineral resources for revenue can amplify existing conflicts, fuelled by the uneven and unbalanced distribution of benefits, costs, and risks. For instance, the oil and gas resources in the Niger Delta have long been exploited by foreign oil companies, without compensation for local people who suffer environmental and health problems from oil extraction.

Climate change induced by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, in particular of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel consumption, is one of the most serious global problems and may eventually be a factor in international security. A comprehensive scientific analysis on the current and future state of the global climate system is given by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released its most recent report in 2001.^[11] If greenhouse gas emissions continue, the expected increase in global mean temperature by 3 to 6 degrees reported by the IPCC would put man and nature in many regions of the world under extreme stress, causing incalculable risks and deep impacts on the Earth’s natural balance. Flooding and droughts, water scarcity and increased forest fires, heavy storms and changing ocean currents, dwindling glaciers and sea-level rise are disasters that can affect many people. Not less severe are slow changes, such as harvest losses, degradation of biodiversity, and the increase in hunger and poverty if the rate of climate change outpaces adaptive reallocation of labor and other means of production. These problems affect developing countries in the South, which are more vulnerable due to their natural geographic conditions and the lack of adaptation capabilities, even though they are less responsible for global warming.

If a stabilization of greenhousegas concentrations cannot be achieved at a tolerable level, mankind may cross a critical point of no return, with potentially disastrous consequences. The decline of the thermohaline circulation that drives the warm Gulf Stream in Europe, the release of greenhouse gases such as methane from polar ice into the atmosphere, the long-term destabilization of the ice shelves in Western Antarctica, with an associated sea-level rise by 4 to 6 meters, and the changing precipitation patterns of the Monsoon in Asia could affect the life of hundreds of millions of people.

The interests of those who address the severe risks of climate change are in contradiction to those who are interested in maintaining the economic system that leads to global warming. Per capita energy consumption and gas emissions in industrialized countries exceed that of poorer developing countries by an order of magnitude. Accordingly, by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol many industrialized countries agreed to limit their emissions, while developing countries still can expand their energy consumption with their economic development. Until it is fully implemented and augmented by further measures by nonsignatories and signatories alike, however, the Kyoto Protocol will have only modest impact on global warming, Unless and until further effective measures are adopted, disputes over the responsibilities for reducing and redressing the impact of global warming will continue.

The dispute over who is responsible for global warming is but an aspect of a broader disagreement over how to bridge the growing gap between environmental and economic goals, thus achieving wealth without destabilizing the climate. With large-scale climate change, grave social and economic disturbances and instabilities are expected which could generate or intensify conflicts on multiple levels.^[12] Climate change can contribute to a decline and widening gap in living conditions, and first of all affects those social groups that are too weak to master the consequences, while more wealthy groups are better equipped to take protection measures against disasters or long-term change. A few actors may feel to be possible “winners“ while most people would be rather “losers“ of global warming.^[13] Imposing the consequences on those who are “remote“ in space and time marginalizes the effected social groups at the “peripheries“ (innersocietal inequity), deepens the contradiction between poor and rich countries (inter- regional inequity), and postpones the problems and burden to future generations (inter-temporal inequity).

In order not to exceed the adaptation capacity of natural and social systems and keep the adverse consequences within limits, guardrails for tolerable climate change have been defined.^[14] According to such an approach, the carbon concentration in the atmosphere should not exceed a doubling compared to pre-industrial levels, which corresponds to a stabilization at 550 ppm (parts per million) carbon equivalent in the atmosphere and a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius compared to 1860. Without carbon capturing and sequestration, this target can only be achieved by a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of at least 50%, which exceeds the Kyoto limits by a factor of ten.

Chain Reactions and Nuclear Conflicts

Nuclear power has been the subject of intense controversy.^[15] For its early proponents nuclear energy represented the promise of unlimited power, “too cheap to meter.” For the opponents, the radiation sign and the nuclear reactor containment dome became symbols of a complex, inherently unsafe and centralized large-scale technology – the evil genie leaving the bottle. All elements of the nuclear fuel cycle became targets of a rising protest movement: uranium mining, fuel element production, reactor operation, reprocessing, transport and storage of nuclear materials. The conflict spread to the scientific community, which until today is split on the impact of low-level nuclear radiation on living organisms and the resulting long-term casualties of radiation releases into the environment.

The reactor accidents at Harrisburg 1979 and Chernobyl 1986, in the hearts of the two former Cold-War adversaries, indeed demonstrated that hypothetical nuclear disasters could become reality and affect millions of people, not to speak of the billions of dollars and rubles spent on crisis management and disaster remediation.

While nuclear accidents occur on short time scales from hours to weeks, and critical events in a disaster may be even decided in minutes, the storage of nuclear waste concerns very long time periods. To sit out the decay of harmful radioactive isotopes, the material has to be isolated from the atmosphere for thousands of years, being a burden for future generations without a guarantee that societies are stable long enough to keep the material from re-entering the biosphere. Whether available technical solutions are adequate and politically manageable remains a subject of intense debate.

What is undeniable is that a single multi-kiloton nuclear explosion in a populated area would be the largest single human catastrophe since the end of WWII. A national security connection can be identified at the origins of almost every nuclear energy program. Such connections range from justification for government spending on technology with military potential, to co-ordination of the nuclear programs in non-nuclearweapons states and those of nuclear allies, to maintenance of “recessed nuclear deterrence” capability by formally non-nuclear-weapons states, to actual coproduction of electricity and weapons plutonium or tritium and dual use of uranium enrichment facilities for electricity and weapons production.

So far, the inherent overlap between the proliferation of nuclear power and of nuclear weapons has not been completely resolved by the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In some cases, this overlap occurs within the bounds of agreed safeguards. This includes the recessed deterrence capability provided by Japan’s otherwise uneconomic fuel reprocessing program and the promise of Iran to stay within the bounds of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) even if it continues to enrich uranium. In other cases, NPT member states have hidden acquisition and use of potentially weapons-relevant nuclear technology, as did Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Iran.

Another potential security issue is vulnerability of energy facilities against war strikes or attacks by non-state actors. This is not only a problem for nuclear energy (though it can be particularly grave here) but for other energy facilities as well, such as oil and gas pipelines, oil tanks, big dams, LNG production and transport, or crucial nodes of the electricity grid.

As with any other energy technology, the risks of nuclear power have to be put in relation to its benefits and costs. The relative energy share of nuclear power plants is far below previous expectations, worldwide the thermal equivalent amounts only to about five percent of all energy use. While a few countries heavily rely on nuclear power, such as France and to some extent Japan, many countries have downgraded their nuclear energy programs, due to low public acceptance and cost overruns. Some, notably Germany, have at least in principle decided to phase out domestic nuclear electric production. Even with a revival of nuclear energy, as some expect now in response to energy shortages and climate change, it cannot provide a sustainable solution to the world’s energy problems in the very long term.

Towards Sustainable Security in the Energy Sector

By coordinating their own stored petroleum reserves and policies,^[16] major oil importers could position themselves to deal much more effectively and efficiently with OPEC through trade negotiations than by threat or use of military force. This would allow to limit the threat of use of NATO countries’ military force against OPEC members to discouraging unlikely outside attacks on OPEC countries or direct and substantial actual violence inflicted on NATO members. This in turn should substantially reduce or even eliminate future international conflict over who has control of energy resources, whether it be oil or gas.

Thus, from both a military and economic perspective, international conflict over fluid fossil energy resources may be made obsolete. However, this also requires that conflict over who has control over energy resources is no longer used to leverage domestic politics, particularly in the United States. Eventually countries will learn that fighting over who has control of oil resources is counter-productive or even ruinous, just as WWI and WWII convinced Europe that fighting over who has control of coal and steel production was obsolete. The essential question is when and how this lesson will be learned when it comes to other energy resources.

Moreover, with oil and natural gas likely facing increasing inflation-adjusted costs during the twenty-first century and capital-intensive nuclear power remaining problematic in the eyes of the public, coal will likely remain a major energy source for quite a while, at the cost of polluting the atmosphere and the risk of substantial damage from climate change. Even if the shorter-term risks of conflict over fossil fuels and mismanagement of nuclear materials can be reduced, coal will be economically competitive where cheap resources are nearby or nuclear power is politically unacceptable or mismatched in complexity with the locally available technological base. Along with increasing efficiency of energy use, the increasing use of renewable energy can provide an alternative to continued reliance on carbon burning with all of the above-mentioned risks.

After overcoming the start-up problems, renewable energy sources (other than large dams) offer an alternative with less risks, conflicts, and security implications. International wars, armed conflicts, and other disasters from use of renewables are quite unlikely compared to oil and nuclear technology. For smallscale projects, disputes can be managed or mediated. A study of the International Energy Agency on the environmental implications of renewable energies comes to the conclusion that „This report shows that renewables can make a significant contribution to reducing greenhouse and acid gas emissions. Renewables have their own environmental impacts but these are often small, sitespecific and local in nature. Nevertheless, their deployment should be accompanied by the many methods identified in this review for ameliorating their potential impacts.“^[17]

However there are risks if renewables are scaled up to the same order as fossil and nuclear energy at a breakneck pace. Because renewables need large areas to gather energy, as can be seen from large dams, they run into land-use disputes, first of all with food production.^[18] To avoid problems that plagued the existing energy system, a sustainable energy transition would take care of the economic, social, and ecological compatibility of each of the respective technologies. A comprehensive assessment would fully account for the material and energy flows in the life cycle, from resource exploration to disposal, and take the socio-economic impacts into consideration, including acceptance and conflicts. With careful attention to regulation of biotechnology use and safety standards for production and maintenance of power generation and transmission equipment, risks to health and the environment could be reduced.

This implies that the energy system and the societal conditions adapt to each other, and that societies do not rely on one single form of energy but rather on an appropriate mix, gradually phasing out the old path combined with energy savings and increased efficiency, while investing into new technologies.^[19] A future society with various kinds of renewables produced and consumed all over the place, would be different from today’s. The ability to generate energy could be much more broadly distributed, either for use on site or for sale in an open market. Future renewable and more decentralized energy technologies should no longer be a source of armed conflict, cause proliferation concerns or raise fears about vulnerabilities. Instead they should strengthen international cooperation and contribute to a more peaceful and sustainable system of global security.^[20]

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Jimmy Carter, State of the Union Address 1980; www.jimmycarterlibrary.org/documents/speeches/su80jec.phtml (accessed November 28, 2004). The White House, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement, February, 1996, www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/national/1996stra.htm (accessed November 28,2004). BMWi 2000. Schindler 1999. See for instance Mitchell 1996, 2001, Müller 2003, Umbach 2003, 2004. Bird 2003. An evaluation of the US energy program can be found in Makhijani 2001a,b, Lovins 2001, 2004. For a view on energy security by the former Democratic Presidential candidate see Kerry 2002. Cheney 2001, p. vii. Cheney 2001, p. 8-5. Cheney 2001, p. viii. IPCC 2001. BMU 2002, Scheffran 1997, 1999. Meyer-Abich 1994. Petschel-Held et al. 1999, WBGU 2003. Liebert/Schmithals 1997, Kalinowski 1998. Singer/Walsh/Wilkening 2004. IEA 1998. For a discussion of conflicts on renewable energy, see Ackermann et al. 2001, Scheffran 2004. WBGU 2003, Edenhofer 2003. Scheer 2002, Alt 2002.

Clifford Singer is Director of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jürgen Scheffran is senior research scientist at ACDIS and editor of the INESAP Information Bulletin. ACDIS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 505 East Armory Ave., MC-533, Champaign, IL 61820, USA; tel. +1-217-333 70 86, fax 244 51 57; csinger@uiuc.edu, scheffra@uiuc.edu; www.acdis.uiuc.edu.   ACDIS is an interdisciplinary research, teaching, and public service program, devoted to advancing and disseminating knowledge about the problems of war and peace. Established in 1978, the program’s primary areas of focus include: energy uses of technology and energy security; South Asian regional security issues; arms control and nuclear non-proliferation policy; conflict management; globalization; democratization in Russia and Eastern Europe; human rights; and military history.