Word: oil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...more than $200 million a year, foreign oilmen at first looked on with skepticism. They questioned French estimates of reserves; they observed that the Sahara's sweet crude (more than 40 degree gravity) yields far more gasoline than Kuwait crude-but less than half as much heavy fuel oil. France most needs heavy fuel oil for its industry, said Petroleum Week, warning of the danger that "France would soon have gasoline running out its ears...
...most of all, foreign oil companies were doubtful that oil could be got out through war-torn Algeria. The F.L.N. rebels, insisting that the French Sahara is an inseparable part of Algeria (although most Algerian Moslems fear the Sahara and have traditionally avoided it), swore to destroy any oil the French tried to move out of the desert, proclaimed that the rebel government would automatically consider void any Sahara concessions that foreign oil companies negotiated with the French government...
What all this will mean to the French economy was spelled out not long ago by Jacques Soustelle. Said he: "Metropolitan France now consumes more than 20 million tons of oil a year. This was the basic factor that for years brought our trade balance into the red. When in five or six years consumption reaches the 36 million-ton level, we will be able to pump between 30 and 50 million tons out of the Sahara...
...Matter of Definition. Soustelle wants to do more than wipe out France's dollar deficit. He hopes to make France a major oil supplier to the entire 168 million people in Western Europe's new Common Market nations, feeding oil by tanker into the southern end of a projected 36-inch pipeline from Marseille to Karlsruhe. Sahara's natural gas might be transported to Europe either by tankers specially built to carry it in liquid form or by a trans-Mediterranean pipeline through Spain. And Algeria itself will benefit from a feeder line to carry gas from...
...Sahara's wealth is not confined to oil: southeast of Tindouf lies what may prove one of the world's largest iron deposits (an estimated 2 billion tons of better-than-50% ore), and below the coalmining center of Colomb-Béchar geologists have found a lode of manganese capable of yielding 50,000 tons a year. Today the great cost of transporting them out of the Sahara excludes exploitation of these heavy ores. But Soustelle, firmly if vaguely, continues to talk of the day when "we shall see materialize in the Sahara...