Interesting! "Rivers of Oil Traced to the Sources" (online)

What’s Online
Rivers of Oil Traced to the Sources
By DAN MITCHELL
Published: August 5, 2006



THOUGH oil specialists told him it was impossible, Paul Salopek, a foreign correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, managed to trace the origins of the gasoline sold at a station near Chicago through the supply chain to the crude oil under the water in the Gulf of Mexico and under the earth in Venezuela, Nigeria and Iraq.

Having done so, Mr. Salopek and his colleagues at the newspaper put together a remarkable Web package that includes the four articles he wrote (called chapters), several sidebars, a video documentary, maps and other features. It serves as sort of a “Fast Food Nation” for the oil industry.

The story begins with Mr. Salopek watching a tanker truck driver, Howard Dunbar, unload 7,723 gallons of fuel at the Marathon station in South Elgin, on the edge of the expanding suburban sprawl 40 miles northwest of Chicago. “It took Dunbar 29 minutes to empty his swimming-pool-size cargo — a workaday chore that reveals the triumphs of our motorized civilization but also the seeds of its possible end,” Mr. Salopek writes.

From there, using data provided by Marathon Petroleum (no other big oil company would help him), he follows the history of that fuel to its “shadowy sources” around the globe.

Mr. Salopek’s narrative is inhabited by a diverse cast of characters. A struggling single mother who manages the gas station and takes home about $500 a week. A customer, a real estate agent, who says she drives a Hummer because it “signals success” to her clients....There is a Nigerian warlord clad only in his underwear as he issues threats against the oil companies and rails against the United States government. A former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s army, now surrounded by machine-gun-toting guards as he risks his life working as a security agent for a British company in the Rumaila oil field. A United States secretary of state (and former Chevron board member) who claims to be surprised at oil’s ability to “warp” world diplomacy....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/05/business/05online.html

LINK TO CHICAGO TRIBUNE WEB PACKAGE (REGISTRATION REQUIRED): http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/broadband/chi-oilsafari-html,1,6933468.htmlstory?coll=chi-newsspecials-hed

nt

not to any honorable or logical or awakened human being. To them a Hummer signals ARROGANCE and short-sightedness, and someone who lives in fear.

Get a clue