Chapter 2: The frontier

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By Paul Salopek | Tribune correspondent

July 29, 2006

The lot occupied by the South Elgin Marathon--Kane County parcel No. 0636200008--first entered recorded history in 1836.

Land records show that the 4,500-square-foot station is part of a homestead cleared by a pioneer named Thomas Mitchell, who arrived by wagon from New York and settled in the beautiful, parklike Fox River Valley soon after the local Sauk and Fox Indians were crushed in the Black Hawk War.

This part of the nation was once called the Northwest Frontier, and it was coveted by settlers for its rich soils and abundant hydropower. America's aggressive history of expansion--its sense of entitlement to boundless energy and resources--has never really paused. Indeed, now it extends to all corners of the world.

From last fall to early spring, a new frontier stream flowed through the Fox River Valley in suburban South Elgin. Its name is the Akwa Ibom. And though it helped keep gasoline bubbling from the Marathon pumps on a busy corner of Highway 25, its real headwaters lie 8,000 miles away in the malarial swamps of Nigeria.

There, crude flowing from offshore fields near the Akwa Ibom's tropical delta supplied the station with roughly a quarter of its oil. This was just one tiny rivulet in the alarming torrent of foreign-bought crude that prompted President Bush, one of the most oil-friendly presidents in history, to concede in his latest State of the Union speech that "America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world."

In its 2005 annual report, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says that 58 percent of all the petroleum burned in the United States now comes from abroad. That stark dependency on outsiders, analysts say, will grow even if the last pockets of oil in America are drilled.

"We know how important this issue is," said Laura Binning, 37, a regular customer at the South Elgin Marathon. "But it's so big. It's hard to get your head around it."

Binning pulled her black H2 Hummer into the station one Saturday afternoon when Qua Iboe crude from Nigeria made up about 26 percent of her $72 gas purchase. She was taking her son Parker, 8, to Little League. She estimated, sheepishly, that her vehicle gets 10 city miles per gallon, moderately better than a semitrailer truck.

"At first it's on your mind," Binning said. "But then you get so busy. I got screaming kids. My mom's got cancer. And I work as a real state marketer out of my house. So you forget."

Binning exudes no-nonsense competence. With her husband, Tim, she rents houses and owns a RE/MAX All Pro real estate franchise in the western suburbs. They and their three children live in a grand home on 2.7 acres in St. Charles, an upscale suburb adjoining more working-class South Elgin. (Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys once owned a mansion nearby.) Aside from Laura's Hummer, the couple own two other vehicles. Their swimming pool heating bill in October topped $2,000.

Laura flashed a wan smile while ticking off her energy bills, just as she winced hearing herself describe the Hummer as "something that signals success to our clients." She knew how that sounded.

But as it happened, the Binnings were among the few gas station customers to ponder America's energy future beyond tomorrow's uptick in gas prices. They grappled with buying an electric-gasoline hybrid vehicle as their next car. They followed the news about peak oil. They fretted over the kind of world their three rambunctious boys--Weston, 3, Spencer, 6, and Parker--would inherit.

In the end, like most Americans, they were optimists. They had little choice. Their livelihood--selling property in suburbia--rests primarily on a dubious supposition: the continuing abundance of cheap crude. Laura faces this reality every day. Shuttling the boys across the suburbs to piano lessons, floor hockey practice, Little League and hip-hop dance classes, she can rack up 40 miles or more in the Hummer.

"Are there problems coming? Maybe. But I prefer to think the glass is half full," said Tim, 37, arriving home from his office one afternoon after a commute of 19 miles each way. "When shortages jack up oil prices permanently, someone will have the incentive to invent another fuel. That's how the market works."

"Like you work--you're a workaholic," Laura gibed in her best Hepburn-Tracy style.

"I am not."

"You were working on Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, even on Thanksgiving."

"I love my job."

The Binnings were sitting in their living room. Their boys played hand-held computer games. Outside, snow slashed diagonally across their ample lawn.

***

Felicia, Beatrice and Comfort were running through Itak Abasi. Breathless. Their bare feet drummed the Nigerian village's sandy alleyways. In their small hands they clutched packets of rehydration salts.

The medicine was free, distributed by health officials at the local school. The village wells were tainted with fecal matter. And people were dying of acute gastric infections, possibly cholera. Two children had succumbed that day. Another two would die the following week. The doctors were angry. They said this was by no means an exceptional occurrence.

Itak Abasi--"Foundation of God" in the local Ibibio language--is a rural slum festering atop a sandbar at the mouth of the Akwa Ibom River. Its hovels squat half a mile from the Exxon Mobil oil export terminal that supplied the bulk of African crude purchased by Marathon and sold in South Elgin. Since 1971, the facility, a sprawling tank farm, has funneled billions of dollars worth of petroleum to the United States. Itak Abasi seethes next door with neither plumbing nor electricity.

"The oil companies are no good," said villager Sunday Jeremiah, 40. "We are crying daily." He is a fisherman. And the running little girls--age 10, 11 and 13--are three of his seven children. They raced each other to the family's palm-leaf hut, stepped over a doormat of periwinkle shells and handed Jeremiah the medical salts. Then they darted away, singing nonsense songs. So far, nobody happened to be dying in the Jeremiah family.

Exxon Mobil's local subsidiary, Mobile Producing Nigeria, pumps the local oil fields in a joint venture with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. The U.S. oil giant has a complex relationship with its destitute neighbors. On one hand, it helped renovate the village's schoolhouse. But it also spilled at least 40,000 barrels of crude into the sea in 1998, a fiasco that fishermen say permanently destroyed the village's traditional livelihood.

The powerful Texas-based company is both courted and reviled by the Ibibio people. The Nigerian central government is for the most part invisible in the backwater region, so everyone turns to the Americans for solutions. When asked why villagers didn't dig latrines--a simple way to blunt fatal gastrointestinal epidemics--Itak Abasi's old, bald-headed chief snapped, "That's the oil company's job!"

Itak Abasi and South Elgin are alike in this way--resentfully hooked on the life-altering power of oil.

The only difference:

In America, it is the scarcity and cost of petroleum that feed anxiety and outrage, whereas in Africa--where Jeremiah sat in his dim hut, staring hard at the hydration salts in his stubby fisherman's hands--it is the substance's taunting abundance.

***

Few Americans realize it, but they have hitched their wagon--or rather their 210 million cars and trucks--to Africa's troubled star.

It is a striking development. The planet's last superpower is rattling its half-empty oilcan at the poorest continent in the world.

This state of affairs has come about because two-thirds of the world's oil is controlled by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, and most of it is pooled in the Middle East. Chronic instability in that region--today stoked by the U.S. intervention in Iraq and Israel's battle with Hezbollah--has further encouraged the United States to hedge its oil bets elsewhere. American companies have trudged to the plateaus of Central Asia looking for low-quality oil. They are punching wells into the ecologically fragile shallows of the Caspian Sea. And they are investing billions in upgrading huge but risky oil fields in business-hostile Russia.

None of these new energy frontiers, however, has captivated industry boardrooms like Africa.

The continent will never match the lavish petroleum endowments of the Middle East. Nigeria, Africa's oil heavyweight with 36 billion barrels of reserves, boasts only a seventh of Saudi Arabia's bounty. Still, African crude has its advantages. It is light and low in sulfur--well-suited to pollutant-sensitive U.S. refineries. Its reservoirs are closer to major East Coast ports. And American companies can do business on the continent unhampered by the terror war tensions that dog them elsewhere.

Americans already get more oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia. By 2015, oil experts say, African states will supply a quarter of all U.S. imports, up from 15 percent today. The United States quietly signaled this shift in 2002, when the State Department declared African oil a "strategic national interest," meaning in diplomatic code that U.S. troops may intervene to protect it.

"I think the U.S. military would find our swamps worse than Iraq," snorted Austin Onuoha, a Nigerian human-rights activist who specializes in oil issues. "But at least they might build some infrastructure after they invade. Americans always do this, right?"

Onuoha's sarcasm was well-earned. He was talking in the dark, from his blacked-out house in the oil-rich Niger Delta. The electricity in Africa's petro-giant had winked out again. And this fit sourly into his main thesis: Oil is rotting Africa's frail democracies.

Nigeria, like Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Republic of Congo and Sudan, suffers from what Onuoha and many other human-rights experts call "the oil curse." In short, geysers of easy petrodollars corrupt weak African institutions. They unleash reckless government spending. And they usually stoke internecine fighting over oil loot and entrench political thuggery.

To fully experience oil's harrowing legacy in Nigeria--the fifth-largest exporter of crude to the United States--you must catch a plane to Port Harcourt, the decaying commercial center of the Niger Delta.

By now "P.H.," as the locals dub it, should be the booming capital of a tropical oil kingdom that spouts as much crude as three Alaskas. Instead, it's a handmade slum. Foreign oil workers zip between the few slapdash hotels in curtained mini-vans, hoping to avert kidnapping by criminal gangs and ethnic militias. The hotels are guarded by men sporting aviator sunglasses and Kalashnikovs. In April, a car bomb, Nigeria's first, rocked the city. In this way, Nigeria is looking more each passing day like the Middle East.

The bloodiest chaos unfolds mostly unseen, however, out amid the syrupy brown rivers that braid the mangroves before sliding into the Atlantic. There, armies of the poor battle the government, foreign companies and each other for a fair share of oil wealth. The impulse is understandable. According to the World Bank, 80 percent of Nigeria's staggering $340 billion in oil revenue has been pocketed by 1 percent of the population--a cast of thugs who include the world's most venal politicians and generals.

Rounding out the picture is world-class pollution (at least 4,800 oil spills over a 20-year period), "bunkerers" (oil thieves who drill into pipelines, often incinerating themselves and hundreds of others in the process), and brutish military tactics (Nigerian troops torching thatched villages and strafing oil smugglers' barges with helicopter gunships). Nobody knows the death toll in the delta. Yet if the killing was once ignored, that's no longer the case.

The tightest crude market in 30 years is turning Nigeria's obscure swamp skirmishes into a global energy flash point. Nigerian insurgents fire off e-mails to the media announcing their next attack on a Shell platform--and crude futures quiver in Tokyo and New York. Oil first hit the $50-a-barrel mark in 2005 when an SUV-driving warlord named Mujahid Dokubo-Asari threatened "all-out war" in the delta.

"We know the world covets Nigerian oil more than ever," said Onengiya Erekosima, a Bible-quoting spokesman for the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force, one of many militias that flourish in the lawless squalor of Nigeria's oil patch.

"We will force the international community to respond to our suffering," Erekosima declared, "because we can cut off their crude at any time."

He made this threat in his underwear while seated on an old couch in Port Harcourt. It was 11 o'clock at night. Iron bars protected the doorway of one of his movement's safe houses. A bare light bulb jaundiced the mostly barren room. The pantless rebel dug a handful of hand-scrawled manifestoes from his cheap briefcase. Proudly, he waved a message from the White House:

"On behalf of President Bush, thank you for your correspondence. We appreciate hearing your views and welcome your suggestions. Due to the large volume of e-mail received, the White House is unable to respond to every message, and therefore this response is an autoreply."

About a quarter of Nigeria's 2.3 million-barrel-a-day crude flow is regularly choked off by the likes of Erekosima.

In Itak Abasi, Sunday Jeremiah's fishing village, the oil war seemed far away. But this was an illusion.

"No jobs, no running water, no electricity, no opportunity, no dignity," spat one furious youth, who gave his name only as Festus. "I am going to carry a gun. I am going to blow up some wells. Otherwise you get nothing in Nigeria."

Tribal sorcerers were daubing young men with chicken blood out in the swamps. Palm wine libations were being offered to the ancestors. This would protect Ibibio militants from bullets, which would "pass through us without harm," Festus said, "like stones through water."

***

In South Elgin, Michelle Vargo was Scotch-taping notices to the Marathon's convenience store countertops: "FREE CANDY BAR IF CASHIER DOES NOT SUGGEST A PRODUCT OR SERVICE."

Post-Katrina gas theft had eased when prices ebbed to $2.85 a gallon--the apparent pain threshold of American motoring. But the convenience store sales had slumped. Since they represent 80 percent of the station's profits, the owner, Prairie State Enterprises, was leaning hard on the staff--and especially on Vargo--to vend.

The gas station store's 550-item inventory exceeds the shopping choices of even the biggest supermarkets in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

But that didn't help Vargo. What do jaded American drivers want? What do they need?

She offers them 88 varieties of cigarettes, 111 types of cool drinks, eight flavors of Tums antacid tablets, three choices of mini-pizzas warming under heat lamps, banana nut cappuccino, AC/DC ball caps, ultra-ribbed condoms, 7-inch locking pliers, and the Denzel Washington version of "The Manchurian Candidate" on DVD. For the spiritually inclined she stocks "Cheech & Chong's" incense and two kinds of Native American dream catchers--meant to ward off bad spirits--made in China and tagged at $9.99 each.

"I'm gonna walk away if the pressure keeps up," Vargo said. "I'd hate to do it. I was here during construction. I feel like this station is mine. But I can't take it forever."

Her cell phone rang. She took the call outside. She paced the pumps, her free arm gesturing wildly under the pearly winter sky. She was ignored by the limo drivers in their dead men's suits. By the grumpy and overworked truckers. And by a man who arrived every day to break a $20 bill with an M&Ms purchase so he could play the Lotto machines.

The station's key commodity--refined petroleum--was as invisible as ever. The only evidence that it even existed was a faint tang of gasoline.

***

Almost every night, Sunday Jeremiah climbs into a motorized open boat and confronts the monster crosscurrents at the mouth of the Akwa Ibom River.

Two waters, salt and sweet, clash there like fanatical armies. They throw up huge, erratic, three-cornered waves that could swamp the most accomplished seaman. Yet Jeremiah threaded them standing, his knees bent to absorb the slamming of the rollers, one hand firmly gripping the outboard's steering handle. Deftly, he goosed the boat up cliff-like swells and sleighed down their watery backs to safety.

"It is nothing," he shrugged, much as a U.S. commuter might dismiss the workaday lethality of the interstate.

Jeremiah was returning home from the high sea--"eye sea" in his delta accent--after an awful night's fishing. Assisted by a lanky colleague named Sunny, he had unspooled 500-yard-long drift nets near gas flares that blazed like minor suns. Six hours of work gleans one basket of bonga, a fish the size of a hand.

"Onshore wind," Jeremiah said stone-faced. "Fish don't like it. It pushes them deep down."

He also blamed oil spills--something Exxon Mobil denies. "[P]ossible effects are assessed after any type of [spill]," company spokeswoman Susan Reeves said in a written statement. "Such assessments have indicated no losses, in terms of type or quantity of fish."

The corporation says it paid coastal communities millions of dollars in restitution after the huge 1998 spill. Reeves added that Exxon Mobil's subsidiary, in cooperation with the Nigerian national oil company, also spends an additional $10 million to $12 million a year on community development in Nigeria, most of it on education, health, roads, micro-enterprises and agricultural assistance.

Little of such money is evident in Itak Abasi, however. In May, angry mobs attacked the company's tank farm in a dispute ignited by a lack of jobs. Local people took oil workers hostage. And at least one Ibibio youth was shot dead by Nigerian security forces. The sorcerers' juju didn't work.

Dawn was breaking as Jeremiah returned home. The flares burned holes in the sky along a pink horizon.

His thatched hut was still darkened. His wife, Rosalie, crouched on the dirt floor inside, fanning the embers of a cooking fire. Children stirred on their palm-leaf pallets. Exhausted and salt-stained, Jeremiah laid back on a rough wooden bench and dozed off to the mutterings of a portable radio. The newscaster was eulogizing Stella Obasanjo, the wife of Nigeria's president, who had just died in Spain--after cosmetic surgery, or so the local press said.

Jeremiah's catch fetched 450 naira at the local market, about $3. His boat engine had swallowed $6 in fuel. As it happened, it was Oct. 27, the day when Exxon Mobil announced record quarterly oil and gas profits of $7.35 billion.

***

Tim Binning's cell phone rang. It did this on average 60 to 70 times a day. He has a 4,000-minute-a-month account. This time it was Laura. A washing machine at one of the Binnings' rental units was on the fritz.

"Go ahead, buy the new one," he advised. "Repairs will cost us almost as much."

Tim was at work in his car, a new Volkswagen Phaeton, a luxury sedan that the couple decided to purchase instead of a hybrid. (Laura worried about trading in the devalued Hummer at a loss.) The sensor-activated wipers slapped away a gray slush, and a satellite navigation console glowed on his dashboard.

A landscape utterly decoupled from Chicago's core slid past Tim's windshield in icy tableaux: Starbucks, horse pastures, big-box stores and old farm-town clapboards marooned amid strip malls. It seemed a place more congenial to automobiles than human beings. People rarely appeared on sidewalks. Yet this suburban backdrop is where more than half of Americans now live.

"Few people here go into downtown Chicago anymore," said Tim, dodging traffic. "When they relocate, it's between suburbs. When they go to work, it's between suburbs. And when they commute it's in all directions. This makes mass transit impractical."

Tim is as adept at reading the asteroid belt of Chicago's edge-city sprawl as Sunday Jeremiah is at coolly appraising the sea.

He noted "mature" versus "hot edge" housing developments and could accurately eyeball square footages while zipping past at 40 m.p.h. He saw the invisible county lines--and property tax differentials--that helped explain why builders erected modest $120,000 townhouses on one corner and $500,000 McMansions on the other. He pointed out that U.S. houses are vastly more heat efficient today than 20 years ago, but added that all these energy savings are eroded by constantly ballooning dream houses: The number of homes larger than 2,400 square feet has doubled since 1987, even as U.S. families continue to shrink.

"Look at what people have now," he said. "Two cars is the norm. So is two or three color TVs. Who in the 1950s had that?"

Tim parked in front of an aging ranchette. The house was for sale. He was assessing its value after its pipes froze, resulting in major water damage. He ordinarily didn't do this anymore. He handled high-end investment properties. Stepping through the cold, stained, empty house in his suit and raincoat, he seemed anxious to leave.

Yet this, according to James Howard Kunstler, was a showcase home of the grim new America to come.

Kunstler, a writer of some renown in urban planning circles, is the Ghost of Christmas Future for peakists. While most analysts confine themselves to debating when the planet's oil supplies will start to slump, Kunstler has plotted energy starvation to its logical extremes. Citing everything from highway maintenance protocols to Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" inventory system, he paints a harsh vista of oil-deprived life ahead.

"America finds itself nearing the end of the cheap-oil age having invested its national wealth in a living arrangement--suburban sprawl--that has no future," he asserts in his 2005 book "The Long Emergency." "Suburbia has a tragic destiny."

Kunstler envisions the car-dependent landscape of the suburbs, especially the farthest-flung subdivisions, decaying into "slums of the future." He sees the doors of oversize, unheated tract homes flapping open forlornly to the chill Midwest winds. Big-box retailers that rely on trucks that get, at best, 8 miles per gallon to deliver sneakers made in China will simply implode, he says. The cavernous shell of the local Wal-Mart will "become anything from an infirmary to a Pentecostal roller rink."

In this bleak vision of a slower, poorer, brown-out world, only trains and barges will be efficient enough to move goods. And millions of Americans will return, painfully, to their agrarian roots. With the enormous energy inputs of industrial agriculture a vanished luxury (up to 16 calories of fossil fuel are now required to produce a single calorie worth of grain), huge amounts of manual labor will be needed for survival-level farming.

Many critics call such predictions hysterical. But a high-powered study released last year by the Department of Energy, the so-called Hirsch report, warns that even with a concerted national effort it could take decades to transition from oil to fuel alternatives, and that "without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented."

With crude prices soaring into orbit, powerful people are listening. Peak oil theory, espoused by the likes of one of Bush's billionaire friends, Richard Rainwater--a Kunstler acolyte--helped persuade the president to insert the "addicted to oil" phrase into the State of the Union speech, according to some Washington insiders.

Back in his car, Tim called Laura to arrange a meeting at a mall eatery 12 miles away. Lunchtime congestion was thickening. He sat, just another commuter alone with his cell phone, in a long line of vehicles at a red light.

Americans consume about 2.3 billion gallons of gasoline each year simply idling in traffic. This equals the annual oil output of Equatorial Guinea, Africa's most promising new petro-state.

***

Sunday Jeremiah lay in the prow of his boat.

It was another clammy night at sea. The sky was curdled an angry orange; such is the brilliance of the gas flares reflected on clouds dragged south by West Africa's harmattan winds. Some children in the Niger Delta know night skies of no other color. Starlight is alien to them.

Jeremiah bolted upright when a loud quacking surrounded the boat. The sound was exactly like a large flock of ducks--except it was coming from under the water.

"Bonga," he said of the small inshore fish. "They make this noise."

He muscled in his long net. It was completely empty.

***

Cruz Rodriguez looked up from the Marathon parking lot: Canada geese were honking overhead, paddling through a sky gray as the inside of an ice cube.

Rodriguez is a 23-year-old station clerk. He raised his push broom like a shotgun and took aim. He watched the birds fly out of sight. He went back to sweeping the station lot again.

It was Christmas Day. The Marathon never sleeps. A cross-section of America--schoolgirls, Bubbas in pickups, rapper wannabes in chains and baggies--stopped to fuel up in red Santa caps. Rodriguez wore one too.

Then the gas station phone rang. It was Michelle Vargo, just checking in.

"She's called five times today," Rodriguez said, shaking his head in amazement.

He was a former gangbanger. Jail had made him philosophical. He once reminded Vargo: "It's just a gas station. When it comes down to it, that's all it is."

The station's computers showed the Marathon sitting atop 10,353 gallons of regular and 2,867 of premium. (Midgrade gasoline draws from both tanks.) About 2,600 gallons of this energy bomb came from Sunday Jeremiah's simmering coast. Rodriguez wasn't interested.

"I got my own worries," he muttered. He has a criminal record. "I wanted to enlist in the Army, but they wouldn't take me. They'd of had my butt in Iraq by now."

A month later, in the form of 8 gallons of gas--in essence, the merest vapors left in an empty tanker truck--Iraq would come to him.

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