Recently there has been some new talk of energy cooperation out there in the international discourse: three energy groups, and one forgotten energy group. Stick with me, here: it's all good, and useful stuff for those of us contemplating small loaves of bread, higher gasoline and heating oil prices.
International Energy Forum:
Yesterday I attended a presentation of the International Energy Forum (IEF) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Ambassador Arne Walther of Norway, the IEFs’ Secretary General, gave the presentation.
The IEF holds low-key but high-ranking organization conferences. According to its S-G Mr. Walther, the IEF posits no particular goals except two: fostering dialogue, and obtaining statistics that help member countries make plans for the future. The dialogue is low-key because the talks are not targeted toward specific outcomes, such as, deciding who should get what oil. However, its high rank is due to the fact that the conferences are conducted at the Ministerial level, and allow a lot of peripheral activity, the exchange of names and cards, jokes and concerns, creating contacts that allow for international cooperation. This kind of unfocused agenda/ focused activity is essential: it is networking, and it creates intangible avenues for other kinds of discourse and future consensus.
The other goal, the Joint Oil Data Initiative (JODI) is a self-reporting aggregation of data, much like the UN, where members compile their own data to report. This is another one of those glacial diplomatic progressions, necessary but achieved incrementally. Everyone wants to know what everybody else has but no one wants to tell what they have in the way of reserves, developed, undeveloped, or strategic. They are now working on getting a database on natural gas–well, that should tell you how incremental this procedure must be. I was surprised to see that Ambassador Walther still had all of his hair, because I would have torn mine out long ago.
However, other issues besides “who-has-what” come up in these sessions. There are also discussions, including reconciling economics and politics, energy poverty, and climate change in re: fossil fuels. Mr. Walther emphasized that the dialogue has shifted to Asia: that would be, China, India, Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf–a set of realities that non-Asia needs to take into account.
Last of all, in the question-and-answer period, Mr. Walther noted that things get done in all sorts of groupings: bilateral and multilateral, regional, and international. Many times, common concerns are addressed more quickly in local or regional dialogue, which brings me to the next set of acronyms:
Shanghai Cooperation Organization:
According to Sergei Blagov, Russia has come to the conclusion that a regional “Energy Club” would be in the best interests of Russia as well as China in the SCO. As we know, China has used its SCO connections with Central Asia to launch aid initiatives and energy deals–a kind of economic collective security. At another talk this week, held at the Wilson Center, Mr. Nikolai Zlobin of the World Security Initiative noted that Russia had been viewing the SCO as a primarily military collective security–and China, economic. This looks set to change.
Uranium:
About a year and a half ago, Mr. Blagov also wrote about Russia's interest in Kazakh uranium, another up-and-coming energy source that would foster Russia's protected Rozatomprom (the nuclear equivalent of Gazprom, ya’all) and this is also an energy concern for the world at large. Earlier this week, Registan.net covered Russia's newest efforts at consolidating uranium commerce. We usually think of uranium in terms of traditional security, but down the road (actually, now) it’ll be important for energy security as well.
GECF:
Last of all, where is the Gas-Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) and what are they doing? This Saudi Arabian-Russian initiative last popped up in the news in April, when Mr. Berdymuhamedov went to Riyadh in order to open relations with the Saudi Arabian government.
Further reading:
Josh Foust over at The Registan was also at the event: hey, that is one intelligent (or do I mean irreverent? yes, both) man in a grey suit. Get his take here.
CSIS event proceedings will be up at http://www.csis.org/ in a few weeks: look under the events or energy categories to discover it.
Photo: heavytees.com
