I cannot vouch for the reliability of this source, so take it with a grain of salt, but this is a fascinating and under-reported story if it is true. A significant Saudi oil pipeline has been destroyed.
For the first time in decades, the Eastern Saudi Arabian volatile situation has reached the vital oil sector. A pipeline between Awamiya and Safwa has been reportedly targeted, and is under fire. Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority, mostly residing in the oil rich east, has been protesting for years against State sponsored discrimination. They are treated as second class citizens, denied public sector jobs, and vital development for their oil rich areas. Saudi Arabia's powerful Wahhabi religious establishment considers Shiites heretics, and constantly incites against them.
Security forces have killed two protesters in Awamiya, Eastern Saudi Arabia. They are launching a series of arrests and raids on houses, schools and mosques.
The Obama administration and economic experts have warned a pre-emptive attack by Israel could send the economy into a slump, which would change the trajectory of campaigns for the White House and Congress.
Economic and energy experts say an attack could cause an oil shock, which sent the United States into recession in the late 1970s. In the early '90s, a similar shock occurred when the OPEC oil embargo and the Iraq invasion of Kuwait sent prices soaring.
“If Iran is to retaliate against Israel or other U.S. targets, it’s really unpredictable. It’s safe to say there would be a big shock to oil prices,” said Adam Hersh, an economist at the Center for American Progress.
“The oil price shock and domestic politics in the United States are my biggest concerns for disrupting the economic recovery we’ve been seeing,” he said.
...
Obama’s poll numbers have gone up with the economy, the chief concern of voters heading into the November election, and any news that would change that trajectory is unwanted at the White House.
Sorry American friends, but even under the best of circumstances, Israel cannot be expected to take the fall for the US economy, and certainly not for Obama's reelection, when its survival is at stake. Once you factor in the fact that Obama is a major cause of this situation by his (in)actions over the last three years, it's a no-brainer that an Israeli decision maker who is charged with protecting Israel should ignore the cost of oil in deciding what to do. That's reality.
Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who visited Doha last week, disclosed at a press conference on Friday: a) China proposes to invest in the manufacturing of ”downstream oil products, which are most urgently needed by Qatar”; b) China and Qatar signed an agreement to jointly build a refinery in Taizhou, Zheijiang, in China; c) Chinese companies propose to participate in infrastructure projects in Qatar; and d) China and Qatar are
discussing a “long-term, stable and comprehensive cooperative partnership” in natural gas.
Then, Wen quietly dropped a bombshell. He revealed “one more important point” as if it were an afterthought. He said:
In order to address investment issues, we [China and Qatar] need financial support. Therefore, we reached another agreement, a cooperation agreement linking finance with investment. Qatar also proposed the use of local currency in trade settlement and even a specific ratio. I think this proposal can be studied.
The short point is, the renminbi, the “people’s currency” also known as the yuan, is appearing in Doha. The China-United Arab Emirates (UAE) currency swap deal which was signed during Wen’s visit to Abu Dhabi last week already brings the yuan to the Emirates. The deal with the UAE is worth US$5.5 billion and the Chinese central bank statement said that it aims at “strengthening bilateral financial cooperation, promoting trade and investments and jointly safeguarding regional financial stability”.
And they're cutting similar deals with Iran.
If there are four more years of Obama, China will be the World's preeminent power, and the US will be relegated to second-rate status or worse.
The 'human rights' organizations ought to be screaming in the streets about this. But they're not.
The old energy order in the Middle East is crumbling, with Iran and Syria having left the Western fold and others, including Saudi Arabia, the largest of them all, in danger of doing so. Simultaneously, a new energy order is emerging to give the West some spine. In this new order, Israel is a major player.
The new energy order is founded on rock -the shale that traps vast stores of energy in deposits around the world. One of the largest deposits -250 billion barrels of oil in Israel's Shfela basin, comparable to Saudi Arabia's entire reserves of 260 billion barrels of oil -has until now been unexploited, partly because the technology required has been expensive, mostly because the multinational oil companies that have the technology fear offending Muslims.
I discussed the Israeli technology that's discussed in the video below here.
I have cited before Golda Meir's famous complaint about Moses:
Former Prime Minister Golda Meir famously complained that Moses could have picked somewhere other than "the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil" as a Jewish homeland.
What is less well-known, but even more dramatic, is the work being done on this country’s oil shale. The British-based World Energy Council reported in November 2010 that Israel had oil shale from which it is possible to extract the equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil. Yet these numbers are currently undergoing a major revision internationally.
A new assessment was released late last year by Dr. Yuval Bartov, chief geologist for Israel Energy Initiatives, at the yearly symposium of the prestigious Colorado School of Mines. He presented data that our oil shale reserves are actually the equivalent of 250 billion barrels (that compares with 260 billion barrels in the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia).
Independent oil industry analysts have been carefully looking at the shale, and have not refuted these findings. As a consequence of these new estimates, we may emerge as the third largest deposit of oil shale, after the US and China.
OIL SHALE mining used to be a dirty business that used up tremendous amounts of water and energy.
Yet new technologies, being developed for Israeli shale, seek to separate the oil from the shale rock 300 meters underground; these techniques actually produce water, rather than use it up.
The technology will be tested in a pilot project followed by a demonstration stage. It will be critical to demonstrate that the underground separation of oil from shale is environmentally sound before going to full-scale production. The present goal is to produce commercial quantities of shale oil by the end of the decade.
This particular project has global significance.
For if Israel develops a unique method for separating oil from shale deep underground, that has none of the negative ecological side-effects of earlier oil shale efforts, that technology can be made available to the whole world, changing the entire global oil market. The effect of the spread of this technology would be to shift the center of gravity of world oil away from Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf to more stable states that have no history of backing terrorism or radical Islamic causes. (In the Arab world, Jordan and Morocco have the most significant oil shale deposits.)
WHEN WILL the West begin to treat Israel as a powerful energy giant and not as a weak client state that must be pressured? In the case of the Saudis, when the US realized the true extent of their oil reserves, after America’s reserves in Texas and Oklahoma were depleted by World War II, it sought to upgrade its military and diplomatic ties with the Saudi kingdom even before its production capacity was fully exploited. The US-Saudi connection grew as massive infrastructure investments for moving Saudi oil to Western markets were made, like the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (TAPLINE).
Breaking: Gadhafi to speak shortly; Libyan oil may be cut tomorrow
Citing al-Arabiya, Israel Radio reports that Muammar Gadhafi will speak to his nation shortly.
The tribe that controls oil production has threatened to stop producing oil on Tuesday if the violent response to the demonstrations does not stop. Libya is the world's fourth largest oil producer.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
I cannot vouch for the reliability of this source, so take it with a grain of salt, but this is a fascinating and under-reported story if it is true. A significant Saudi oil pipeline has been destroyed. 
