ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Killed, President Trump Announces

George Turner in reply to Mr.Joe says:

We’ve been in the area for over 15 years and apparently some people still think we slip in a steal the oil, perhaps sending it home in used Pepsi bottles or something. I used to tell such people that I only pay $1.25 for gas because I have my BushChenneyHaliburton Neocon Savings card and get to fill up with sweet Iraqi crude.

The US doesn’t even have a structure whereby we can make money from foreign oil. Our mineral laws are staggeringly different from most of the world, in that the government doesn’t actually own what’s under the ground except on federal land, and even there it is severely constrained.

Oil companies only rarely own the oil they pump. The oil is owned by farmers, ranchers, or whoever else owns the land, unless they’ve sold off the mineral rights to their property, as was frequently the case in Appalachian coal fields. The oil companies negotiate contracts with land owners to pump the oil and sell it, and these can be quite sophisticated because both sides have lawyers.

On federal land or in federal waters the oil companies are negotiating with the US government on drilling rights and leases, and the same can be true of state land (such as in Alaska). That would be the same if they were negotiating with Brazil or Vietnam for drilling rights.

In foreign countries a US oil company negotiates leasing or drilling rights with whoever owns the oil. In some places that might be the land owner, in others it’s the local warlord. In the Middle East or Africa that was usually the potentate who’d exerted sovereignty and claimed to own everything under the ground – in the name of the people. In more sophisticated places, like Europe, that was also usually the potentate who’d exerted sovereignty and claimed to own everything under the ground – in the name of the people.

Many countries (OPEC nations for example) finally voided oil contracts with foreign entities and nationalized all the oil to get a better cut of the profits. But often they were negotiating with national oil companies such as ELF, FINA, TOTAL, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleium, or Gasprom. The US has no equivalent because the US government doesn’t run its own oil company, much less just have the one national oil company that is a branch of the government.

What the US does have is a bunch of privately or publicly owned oil companies, along with car companies, computer companies, potato chip companies, and entertainment companies. There have been times when socialist or business leaning folks in the US government tried to go to bat for various US industries in foreign countries, such as banana companies, which gave us the phrase “banana Republic”, but we try not to act like that anymore because it’s generally wildly corrupt and our soldiers don’t like being corporate stooges.

In Iraq, the US government decided to spend tax dollars rebuilding Iraq’s oil facilities so Iraq could generate revenue and so, in theory, pay the US government part of the costs of the war. Those promises were pretty infamous. So the US government gave a reconstruction contract to Haliburton, the only US company that did oil field infrastructure work on that scale. Note that Haliburton never pumped any oil, because they’re not an oil company. The oil was pumped by European, Chinese, and Russian companies who were the winning bidders on all the Iraqi oil contracts. US companies weren’t going to go in there because it’s a horrible place to try and work, the optics would look bad, and US oil workers would be sitting ducks. There are far easier places for Exxon or Mobile to drill.

As for the US military, they don’t even have a field manual for oil drilling, or an oil drilling department. They have plenty on doing environmental clean ups, though, with a staggeringly large budget. We could roll into a Syrian oil field to do remediation and clean up, because we got that. We’ve got nothing for actually pumping, shipping, and selling the oil, though. You’ll never meet a sergeant who ran a pump jack.

Nor does the DoD have a department of oil sales, or even a department who figures out which camel herder has a legal deed with mineral rights. They can act like cops who make sure person A doesn’t loot the property of person B, or that person C isn’t committing armed robbery of person D, but that’s it. When you call a cop because your store is getting robbed, they don’t show up and claim ownership of it. Somehow the left has got that idea stuck in their heads and they simply can’t let go of it, probably because their extreme wing opposed WW-II as a war for the interests of Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum,. and opposed Vietnam as a war for Vietnamese oil, and just haven’t figured out a new pitch.

At most, the worst the US will do when we go into a foreign country that has vast energy reserves is make them hire Hunter Biden.Report