BIG OIL SPIKES EASY SOLUTION

As Consumers Gouged at the Pump, Petroleum Barons Ignore Alaskan Oil

By Mark Anderson

Why is the price of gas approaching, or even reaching, $4 a gallon in states such as California, Washington, Hawaii and pushing $5 a gallon in Vancouver, Canada? Is there no relief in sight?

In a sustained effort to answer these questions, AFP, which has published articles on fuel alternatives such as biodiesel and ethanol, is adding pertinent news on regular oil to this ongoing series.

This week, AFP contacted Lindsey Williams, a noted author and speaker on oil issues who served as an on-site chaplain in the mid-1970s during the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline’s construction and was given executive status by Alyeska Pipeline Service Company—a consortium of nine major oil companies that built the pipeline. Such status, offered to him by Alyeska Personnel Relations Manager R.H. King, enabled Williams to sit in during high-level meetings of oil executives during the pipeline’s construction for a period of two-and-a-half years.

An ordained Baptist minister, Williams announced at a Kansas City forum in July 2006, covered by this AFP reporter, that there was a long-term plan in the works to raise gas prices past $4 or $5 per gallon.

Now, the current outrageous prices at the pump are prompting Americans to seek real answers, not more drivel from the regular news media on where to find a gas station selling its fuel a few cents cheaper than another station.

THE BIG PICTURE

He said it’s important to understand that the American people—at the hands of insider operatives such as Henry Kissinger—have been put into a terrible bind when it comes to oil. According to Williams, a Kissinger-brokered deal during the 1970s called on the United States to buy large quantities of oil from major overseas oil-producing states, which started the current gluttonous addiction to imported oil.

In exchange for our pledge to buy this oil, these distant oil-producing nations, including Arab states, would buy U.S. government bonds to prop-up the U.S. dollar and help the United States engage in the nonstop deficit spending that created a national debt so large that it defies comprehension.

So why doesn’t the United States get some backbone, cut oil imports and extract, process and use its own domestic oil supplies? Because it’s not that simple, unfortunately.

According to Williams, if the United States were to promptly call it quits on buying foreign oil and use the enormous amounts of untapped crude oil from under Alaska’s north slope and other regions within the lower United States, the rug would be yanked out from under our nation’s economy under the current arrangement.

Once a mighty manufacturing nation—while still possessing all the resources it needs to regain that status— the United States has been converted into a virtual outlet mall for imports under today’s free trade system, which replaced our national economy with an international system.

Oil, and just about everything else that Americans buy, is imported, and this consumer spending fattens the bank accounts of foreign interests. With the surplus cash from Americans’ pocketbooks, foreign interests buy up the U.S. national debt, creating a perverse need to sell imports in the states to fund foreign purchases of U.S. government securities and prop up the dollar and the economy as a whole. So, Americans seem indentured to imports.

“The way to end dependency on foreign oil is to produce it from your own soil,” said Williams. A skeptic on whether biodiesel and ethanol will ever become economically viable alternatives used widely enough to challenge petroleum, he maintains that it would be less expensive to restore domestic oil production. Williams’s The Energy Non-Crisis, which was first published in 1980 amid the supposed “energy crisis” of the 1970s and the early 1980s, argues that the energy crisis never existed and the United States has always had all the oil it needs.

MISSING OIL PIPELINES

Williams told AFP that the corridor for the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline, unbeknownst to most Americans, was designed for two crude oil pipelines and a third one for natural gas, but only one crude line was ever built.

“The oil companies now do not want the other two pipelines built,” said Williams, noting that the federal government stopped their construction.

The existing pipeline was designed to handle a flow of 1.7 million to 2 million barrels of oil every 24 hours, but the flow today has allegedly been reduced to a near-trickle. Williams understands that the amount of oil flowing through the 800-mile-long pipeline is small enough to require the use of a “pig,” a kind of pipe cleaner, because under-utilizing the line allows foreign material to build up on the inside of the pipe, thus putting a strain on the only pipeline in the system. That helps keep domestic oil supplies low, further securing America’s addiction to foreign “black gold” while keeping prices high at the pump.

Nor does it help that the oil companies are only required to send 40% of the Alaskan crude oil coming through the existing pipeline to American refineries. Williams told AFP that a sizable portion of that oil goes to Japanese refineries and elsewhere.

HOW ABOUT $1.50 OR LESS?

The way to get gas prices down to $1.50 a gallon or lower, as Williams sees it, is to drill more crude oil from U.S. soil and send most or all of it to American refineries.

“It’s a matter of Washington D.C. being honest and caring more for the American people rather than treaties made with the oil-producing countries of the world,” he said.

He reiterated a profound fact he spoke of in Kansas City: North of the Brooks Mountains is the area known as Alaska’s North Slope, within which is Prudhoe Bay.

The whole slope is oil-rich. But at Gull Island a few miles off the bay’s coast are gargantuan pools of crude oil with plenty of natural artesian pressure that has been ready for extraction for decades but has been capped instead. This enormous oil supply’s existence is kept quiet via government decree, but Williams learned of it from an oil executive during the pipeline’s construction.

Today, he said it would not take long to extract this low-sulfur oil and send it down the existing Alaska pipeline and onward to American refineries and into our gas tanks. In his book, Williams notes that the North-Slope area oil fields, including Gull Island, easily rival those of Saudi Arabia in size. For now, all of the oil coming through the existing pipeline is from several oil wells in a small area at Prudhoe Bay—a mere fraction of the immense amount of oil locked under the ground, ready to displace Arab oil and usher in an era of U.S. energy independence.

But the Bush administration, Williams maintains, will not allow this to happen.

Call 1-800-321-2900 to order Williams’s book The Energy Non-Crisis and to order a 90-minute DVD of Williams speaking on the subject of oil.

American Free Press reporter Mark Anderson can be reached via email at [email protected] Watch future AFP issues for more on America’s welcome acceptance of biofuels and other energy alternatives, helping end our gluttonous addiction to foreign petroleum. Also, Mark will focus on the efforts of “Big Energy” to suppress these simple, cost-effective solutions.

(Issue #22, May 28, 2007)