Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil

Although Africa has long been known to be rich in oil, extracting it hadn’t seemed worth the effort and risk until recently. But as the geopolitics of oil shift, with the price of Middle Eastern crude skyrocketing and advancing technology making reserves easier to tap, the region has become the scene of a competition between major powers that recalls the nineteenth-century scramble for colonization there. But what does this giddy new oil boom mean—for American energy security, the world, an...