Abstract Resource nationalism, political disputes between national and local authorities over revenue sharing, and insecurity, are common country level political risks in Africa’s oil and gas industries. But the boom decade gave new significance to regional risk. High international oil prices between 2004 and 2014 incentivized exploration and development in frontier countries and led to new oil and gas discoveries across the continent. In East Africa, regional cooperation and cross-border pipeline infrastructure is necessary to…
Entries by Luke Patey
In the past two decades, China’s national oil companies have become new players in the international oil industry. When they first entered the global scene in the 1990s, Chinese NOCs held few competitive advantages over international oil companies. They lacked the organizational capabilities and expertise to manage large projects overseas and had little experience with political and security risk. This article argues that political, social and security dynamics in the host countries of Chinese NOCs…
The need for oil in Asia’s new industrial powers, China and India, has grown dramatically. The New Kings of Crude takes the reader from the dusty streets of an African capital to Asia’s glistening corporate towers to provide a first look at how the world’s rising economies established new international oil empires in Sudan, amid one of Africa’s longest-running and deadliest civil wars. For over a decade, Sudan fuelled the international rise of Chinese and Indian national…
This analysis of the political economy of oil in Sudan since 2005 finds that governance at national, regional, and local levels has largely failed to manage the damaging political and economic effects of the resource curse. Uncertainty surrounding Khartoum’s oil transfers to the South, negligence and corruption among the Southern elite, and the lack of a peace dividend to offset environmental degradation in oil-bearing regions trace the multiplicity of the resource curse in Sudan. Download