Energy is vital to everyone in the world. We need energy to function and it is especially important to the economy. Different countries utilise different energy sources for their respective advantages but usually there are geo-political issues that arise from a demand for energy resources. Some of the issues include energy disasters, TNC exploitation of foreign workers and State brutality against environmentalists/conservationists.
Energy disasters (a hot topic with the deep water horizon incident) cause geo-political issues. The issues that have been created are the fact BP (the leaser of the oil rig and therefore the people held responsible) are a British firm and they have caused widespread damage to American property and environment. Thus conflicts between the U.S government and BP/ U.K government have come to light. The reason why the energy demand created this issue is simple, if demand for oil wasn’t so vast there would have been no need to undergo deep sea drilling but the demand was there and therefore the accident happened.
TNC exploitation is an issue which occurred between Royal Dutch Shell and Nigeria in the 90’s. Shell started drilling for oil in Ogoni people land, this created issues between shell and the people of the land. Shell faced much opposition to their involvement in Nigeria. They got involved with the Nigerian army to try and curb the opposition, many natives were killed (shell pulled out of that area after a 300,000 strong protest) by the army who acted brutally. Shell was taken to court in the U.S under issues deriving from the execution of anti-shell Ogoni people and involvement with the militaristic regime. Shell also created other problems such as oil spills and fires in the Nigeria delta region. The overall occurrences sparked a massive armed conflict in the Delta region over oil. This has created a very tense relationship between Nigeria, its people and foreign TNC’s drilling for oil.