Andra's post via KC

The following is a link to a report that I found released by the U.S. Department of Energy on the environmental impacts of oil production in Saudi Arabia:
http://www.earthscape.org/r1/ES15071/doe_saudi.html
As is evident in “Blood and Oil” readings for this week, the production of oil in Saudi Arabia is strongly linked to not only fuel use for the military, but also, to U.S. relations that help fund the Saudi Arabian military. As a result, the effects that oil processing has on the nation’s environment can be constructed as an issue of the environmental degradation of war.
The report describes, for example, how as demand for oil exports increases, shipping traffic from Saudi Arabia has become more congested, and as a result the amount of accidents and oil spills have gone up as well. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia’s practices of offshore drilling have several negative environmental implications. For instance, coral reefs located on the Saudi coast as well as the Mangrove populations have been depleted from oil contamination. Another problem is that the waste-water left over from the oil production is very high in salt content, upsetting the balance of salt in these waters.
These are only a few of the effects seen in Saudi Arabia from the production of oil. The air has also been degraded from pollution as well as the expected hazards of increased carbon emissions. The report concludes by saying the Saudi government is intensifying efforts to increase awareness about environmental issues.
I think it is important to not only recognize the environmental effects cause by oil production and military expansion, but also examine the forces that are encouraging or enabling this degradation. The United States is a major source of the demand for oil as well as a financer of their military in return. We must question who has the responsibility to address these environmental issues? Is it only the Saudi government that must tend to the state of the environment in their nation or do other powers need to assist in the development? More importantly, perhaps, who is most capable and would most realistically offer constructive reform?

Gulf War oil spill

I found it relatively difficult to find anything concrete on this topic, so I decided to look at the Persian Gulf for inspiration. I decided to look at the Persian Gulf, since Saudi Arabia has a share in the coast and waters of the Gulf, but has not itself experienced a war in some time now and the topic is war related due to Kuwait, Iraq and Iran.

I found this article on an Iranian news and culture journal, at http://www.iranian.ws/cgi-bin/iran_news/exec/view.cgi/2/2181, which talked about the pollution in the Persian Gulf. It said that there was “The world largest oil spill, estimated 8 million barrels” (approx 336 million gallons), which made the want to look into that. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill) the spill was estimated to be somewhere between 42 to 462 million gallons, which is a lot of oil. Then again, it’s not that much, if one takes into consideration hat, according to the CIA factbook, in 2007 the world produced 85,5 million barrels of oil PER DAY. That makes it around 310 billion barrels per year, if I am not wrong in my calculations!

Anyway, such a major spillage has had never happened in the world – the closest one to this one was in 1979/80 in the Gulf of Mexico and it had somewhere between 454,000 to 480,000 tons of crude oil, while the “Gulf War oil spill” had 780,000-1,500,000 tons of crude oil.

Coming back to the original article, this is what it said about the oil spill:

“Saudi Arabia had the worst damage. Because the animals and plants of the seafloor are the basis of the food chain, damage to the shoreline consequences for the whole shallow- water ecosystem.

The impact of the damage affected the multimillion-dollar Saudi fisheries industry and surrounding area including Medina al Jubayl. The spill threatened industrial facilities in Al Jubayl . The greatest pollution was experienced in Abu Ali Island. The large number of marine birds, such as grebes, cormorants, and auks were killed.

Beaches along the entire Al Jubayl coastline were covered with tar balls and oil. The exploding and burning of 700 miles oil wells in Kuwait created staggering levels of atmospheric pollution.”

Obviously, the oil spill had rather direct impact on Saudi Arabia’s environment (and all of the nations of the Persian Gulf) and was definitely related to the war in Iraq and Kuwait at that point.

Coral Reefs

Sorry this posting is late. My computer crashed and burned and IT needed time to try and heal the wounds. I am doing homework at work

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=9&section=0&article=121163&d=4&m=4&y=2009

The article above discusses a new study being launched into the Saudi Arabian coral reef system in the Red sea. The study is a collaboration between organizations in the United States, Saudi Arabia and the international community. While the coral reefs being studied have not suffered from the impacts of war, in the sense that they have not be subjected to oil spills, but only the stresses put on them by fishermen. So it isn't really the environmental impacts of war, more the environmental impacts of daily, normal, life.

What I found so interesting though, is that collaboration on scientific research like this. So often I tend to think of the Middle East as a region so riddled by war, conflict and political divides that they never encounter or productively deal with other issues. Articles like this show that Arab nations are concerned with domestic issues as well, and are actively working to find solutions to environmental problems within their own borders.