World War III an Energy War
Vadim VIKHROV
Strategic Culture Foundation
This April, the gas sector news centered around the traditional issues
of production, supplies, and plans for the cultivation of recently
discovered deposits occasionally bordered on battlefield reports. The
events which were drawing media coverage hardly warrant the nervous
projections about a prelude to a series of full-blown conflicts but do
lend extra credibility to Z. Brzezinski's fairly old assessment that
World War III over the dwindling global energy resources has long become
an objective reality.
At least three developments related to the energy sector must be
mentioned in the context of the crumbling global energy security. Early
this April, gunmen in Yemen blew up the 38-inch pipeline used to feed
gas to the Balhaf LNG terminal, disrupting the operations of Yemen LNG,
which is run by France's Total. The media attributed the attack to Al
Qaeda which supposedly avenged the killing of several militants by a US
drone hours earlier, but it has to be taken into account that LNG from
the Arabian Peninsula is, under long-term contracts, supplied by GDF
Suez S.A., Total, and Korea Gas Corporation (KOGAS) exclusively to
Europe and Asia and, from Al Qaeda's perspective, attacking a European
company's facilities not geared towards the US should have made no
sense.
