The Americans want to mix oil and water.
American business is eyeing gas reserves of Bangladesh and the Indian Northeast, but have they studied the history of East South Asia?
It was a big gathering. Politicians from Bangladesh, Nepal and the northeastern states of India had converged in Calcutta along with senior executives of more than 130 US companies to attend what was called the "US Investor Summit: Emerging East". (Bhutan, though invited, chose to stay away.) The conference ended on 11 December with a call to "highlight the possibility of a new kind of trade – trading in energy, fuel and power".
Gas renaissance
Bangladesh has a proven natural gas reserve of 23 trillion cubic feet, but estimates place the actual reserve at more than twice that. The northeast Indian states like Assam and Tripura have natural gas reserves estimated at half that quantum. Of the five memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed during the conference, two concerned exploratory studies into the possibility of bringing natural gas from Bangladesh and northeast India across to industrial centres like Calcutta for developing power and fertiliser plants. While the MOU between power giant Enron and the Calcutta-based RPG group called for a "joint study of gas requirements in eastern India", the one signed by UNOCAL and the Indian company Paharpur Cooling Towers was described grandly by both sides as "Project Energy Renaissance". A UNOCAL press release on Project Energy Renaissance said the project aims at creating pipelines to transport up to one billion cubic feet of "competitively priced clean burning natural gas to industrial centres in West Bengal and beyond." Obviously there is a market in mainland India for gas from Bangladesh and the Northeast, but given the deep-seated misgivings that these regions harbour against the Indian heartland, there was bound to be a reaction. The MOUs involving UNOCAL and Enron and the Calcutta-based companies provoked an immediate and fierce outburst. "These US companies are planning to take our gas to India but we want our gas to speed up our industrialisation, not India´s," remonstrated Bangladesh´s Industries Minister Tofail Ahmed. Minister Ahmed told Himal that the Awami League government´s topmost priority was the speedy industrialisation of the country by using its natural gas reserve. This is why it is keen to secure foreign investment in the country´s energy sector, but it was not clear in Calcutta how Dhaka hoped to attract foreign investment by blocking out the very market in West Bengal where the American investors saw some prospects. Bangladesh has recently offered a number of potential hydrocarbon ´blocks´ (areas) to foreign prospectors, tying them up in production-sharing contracts.