Groundswell by Ezra Levant

Author:Ezra Levant [Levant, Ezra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-4646-9
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2014-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

FRANCE

France imports 98 per cent of its natural gas needs, or 4.7 billion cubic feet per day. A quarter of that comes from Russia.

But France’s thirst for energy has driven it into even rougher hands than Vladimir Putin’s. France was one of the largest importers of energy from Libya, under its late dictator Muammar Gaddafi. It was Western Europe that kept Gaddafi in power by buying energy from him, and that lucrative business financed his brutal dictatorship for decades.

And the thing about doing so much business with a corrupt dictator is that it just might corrupt you, too. According to allegations made before a French judge, France wasn’t just importing Libyan oil and gas, but Libyan values: Gaddafi, claims Middle East fixer Ziad Takieddine, paid 50 million euros to finance Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2006 election campaign. Sarkozy denies the charge.28

But there’s no need to point to secret deals to demonstrate the problem with France having to import so much of its energy. The public facts of it are bad enough: at best, being dependent on other countries for energy is an economic drain, as billions of dollars a year leave the country. And at worst, it risks the security of supply of that energy – especially when so many of the suppliers are Arab dictatorships, and the so-called Arab Spring is still roiling.

In January of 2013, Al Qaida – linked terrorists attacked a major Algerian natural gas facility near the Libyan border. The hostage-taking lasted four days, and when it was over, thirty-seven workers at the plant were dead, including six Brits.29

Security analysts claimed that the attack on the gas facilities was a reaction to France’s military action against Islamic extremists in Mali, another African country. Whatever the rationale, the attacks on European energy sources seem to be the new normal: only a few weeks later, two pipeline guards were killed in another terrorist attack on Algerian pipelines.30

But France is lucky; it sits on enormous, proven resources of shale gas, in large geological basins around Paris and the southeast of the country: 727 trillion cubic feet are in place, of which 137 tcf is estimated to be recoverable at current prices and with today’s technology.31

A million of anything is hard to fathom, and a trillion is a million millions. But put it this way: if France is sitting on 180 tcf of gas, that’s a little bit more than 100 years of the country’s total natural gas needs. And the same French shale that holds promise for gas has oil in it, too – 117 billion barrels of it in place, with up to 4.7 billion barrels recoverable with today’s technology and prices,32 in the Paris Basin alone.

But fracking in France is at a standstill. Perhaps it’s because the technology is publicly associated with America – France is the country that loves to hate (or at least pretend to hate) American symbols like Walt Disney or McDonald’s. But here’s the thing: after noisily condemning Euro Disney for years, the French embraced it, so much so that it’s now the top tourist attraction in all of Europe.

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