ABSTRACT
In March 2011, the Obama administration released its new ‘blueprint’ for American energy security. At least since the 2001 September 11 attacks, the very notion of a secure – and securitized – energy supply had once more returned to public consciousness in the wake of almost 15 years of relatively low oil prices and, even with the instabilities surrounding the Gulf War, few supply-side problems driven by rising oil reserves, abundant supplies and serious disagreements within OPEC. Amidst concerns over elevated oil prices, the California electricity crisis in 2000, and regional supply disruptions framed by the massive uncertainties surrounding the launching of the US-led War on Terror, American policy discourse on energy over the last decade – and indeed within and among the trans-Atlantic economies more generally – shifted toward a less sanguine assessment of the energy security landscape. The Cheney Report – more formally the Energy Task Force that formulated the national energy policy (NEP) – released in May 2001 immediately before the al-Qaeda attacks, turned once again on the question of American oil-dependency (a plank of American energy security policy since the Kissinger years), and on oil states, as the vice president famously opined, that did not have US interests at heart. The report’s subtitle – Reliable, Affordable, Environmentally Sound Energy for America’s Future – proved to be a digression, since it pointed to a raft of supply-side offerings with precious little in the way of environmental soundness. Rather the proposed policy would open up federal lands to drilling for oil and gas, notably by reducing restrictions on such drilling, unlock a part of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for oil and gas drilling and actively promote drilling in offshore Arctic areas off Alaska. In addition it offered $2 billion for research on clean coal technologies and provide what it termed regulatory certainty to promote investment in coal burning for electricity generation, and it would “support the expansion of nuclear energy in the United States as a major component of our national energy policy.” The Cheney plan advocated that the United States should build between 1,300 and 1,900 new electric power plants by the year 2020. On the energy infrastructural front, natural gas, and electricity transmission lines were to be fostered by new legislation granting rights of way on federal lands. As an ex-oil man (Halliburton) working under an ex-oil man
president (Harken Energy Corp.), Cheney offered precious little about conservation or alternative sources of energy but was obsessed with getting more oil (and secondarily gas) and getting the politics of oil supply right (in his case the new supply regions in the Caspian and the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa).
