Peak Oil and Senegal

international | environment | other press

Friday April 13, 2007 18:09

by Terence

How Peak Oil will or is affecting Senegal and mostly likely the rest of Africa

There is a new article over on the oildrum.com website about: Peak Oil and Senegal. The author of the piece recently visited the country for himself and noted that they generate about 75% of their electricity by burning oil. This makes them very vulnerable to price increases since they are a relatively poor country and will have difficultly affording it.

This story is interesting because it is probably a relatively good model of how Peak Oil will affect much of the Third World.

In the rest of the article the author recounts how oil powered generation has largely been phased out in the West but probably exists because the capital costs of other types of power stations in places like Senegal would be too high for them.

The report contains like of interesting statistics, one for example showing the per capita consumption of oil is a little over 10 times less than the UK.

Here's some quotes from the article:

In Senegal 37% of the nation's oil supply is used in electricity generation which in turn represents approximately 76% of the nations electricity supply. ....This is a critical vulnerability, a vulnerability that was realised last year with price rises and frequent blackouts....
It is likely that it won’t take very much of a price hike for other countries to out bid the Senegalese on the international crude market. The situation could arise where the price of oil doubles with relatively little impact in the West as such a small proportion of total income is actually spent on oil but with massive impact in Senegal. The UK alone will be importing many times Senegal's total imports of ~30,000 barrels per day in just a few years time. Imports, at the expense of poorer countries, that could be avoided with relatively minor changes to UK usage. The lights could go out across large parts of Africa as a direct result of oil scarcity whilst the West continues to drive inefficient cars and frequently fly.

From the author's experience and findings their, he ends the report with the following sober conclusions:

The sorry truth of the situation is that poor countries with little or no fossil fuel resources of their own often rely on imported oil for electricity generation. If peak oil results in substantial and prolonged price hikes, demand destruction from these poor countries is the obvious result. However this won’t only result in the reduced transportation services we typically associate with oil shortages but more critically will result in reduced electricity availability effecting communications, refrigeration, lighting etc. services that are perhaps more important than internal combustion engine transportation, especially in a country with only 0.02 cars per capita anyway

For those interested in this topic, they might be interested in the article: The politics and reality of the peak oil scare at http://www.indymedia.ie/article/81815

The full article of the above post: Peak Oil and Senegal can be found at the URL below.

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Peak Oil and Senegal