In 2005, Fu Chengyu, then-CEO of the state-controlled Chinese oil company CNOOC, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, titled, Why is America Worried? Fu (pictured above) intended to reassure Americans that he meant no harm with a bid at the time to buy Unocal, the California-based oil company. But it did no good: Americans were in fact worried about allowing what they regarded as a strategic resource to fall into the hands of a rival country. Instead Chevron, with a lower bid, ended up with Unocal.

Today, Fu, now CEO of another Chinese oil giant called Sinopec, is back in the United States. He has been buying up minority stakes in large unconventional oil fields -- shale gas and shale oil -- through deals with companies like Chesapeake Energy and Devon Energy. The Wall Street Journal says the state-by-state total investment since 2010 between Sinopec and CNOOC has been $17 billion.

So should America again be fearful? The answer is no. Specifically, if the U.S. were presented today with a similar situation in which Sinopec, CNOOC or another big Chinese enterprise bid on a U.S. oil company, it ought to eagerly embrace it.

The reason is that, unlike with IT or other high-tech intellectual property, it is in the United States' strategic interest for China to possess its companies' cutting-edge oilfield technology, specifically how to develop shale gas and shale oil. China will keenly seize on that technology and apply it back home, with the result that pressure will be reduced on global oil prices. On shale gas, because a big find of indigenous gas is one of the only ways in which China will switch out of far dirtier coal in the production of electricity, it would be a strategic achievement if China became a first-rate fracker.

I spoke this morning with an oilman having specific interest in the subject -- John Imle, Unocal's former president. Imle said that a Chinese acquisition of a U.S. energy company -- say, Chesapeake, the second-largest gas player in the country -- would be "all upside" for the U.S. He said:

It's part of globalization and not an unhealthy part. It's positive for humanity because it results in energy supplies that are adequate so we don't have energy wars down the road. And it should provide lower-cost energy globally, which is important for the global economy. So I don't see any downside. It's all up. We want the Chinese to have plenty of gas.

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Until a few days ago, high gasoline prices threatened to bring down Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan. A denial of oil markets to Iran is currently raising the specter of deadly brinksmanship in the Strait of Hormuz (pictured above, looking peaceful off the coast of Oman), and potential terrorism in Saudi Arabia. Now, if U.S. President Barack Obama's opponents have their way, his rejection of a new oil pipeline from Canada will help to incite his ouster later this year.

Ever since the mid-to-late 19^th century, when Edwin Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania and the Czar freed up drilling in Baku, the passions unleashed by energy have played an outsized role in local- and geo-politics. Yet there is something different today in sheer scale -- although wars and brandished fists over oil are not new, we'd need to go back to the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, for instance, to find a pure energy event that so threatened an occupant of the White House.

The storm of energy-driven geopolitical turbulence shows no signs of letting up any time soon. One impact is in the price of oil, which traders are keeping above $100 a barrel mostly over Iran, and the potential loss of some 17 million barrels a day to the market should it mine Hormuz or achieve the same outcome with speedboat harassment of tanker traffic. As precedence, traders are harking back to the nightmarish 1980s "Tanker War" between Iraq and Iran in which some 250 supertankers were sunk, write the Financial Times' Javier Blas and Caroline Binham. If it were not for such tension, traders might bid oil prices below $90-a-barrel, judging by a new International Energy Agency report that absolute global oil demand had a rare overall decline last year, and may fall in 2012 as well.

Oil prices are a prime geopolitical metric given their affect on the economic health of nations, along with their ability to at turns embolden or depress the leaders of nations like Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. But there are additional measures of energy's intensified geopolitical impact.

Go to the Jump.

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In and around Russia, pipeline politics means raw power -- who will exercise influence from Eastern Europe across to the steppes of Kazakhstan. In the United States, it's hardly more subtle: If companies and the Obama administration can navigate no-less-labyrinthine politics, the nation can more comfortably find its way in the Middle East. This lessened fear of lost supplies would coincide with a larger, steady source of both domestic crude, plus Saudi-size reservoirs across the Americas.

U.S.-style pipeline politics center on the proposed 1,600-mile Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would dedicate some 1.1 million barrels a day of Canadian oil to the United States and simultaneously unleash 46 million barrels of oil chronically bottled up as storage in a tiny Oklahoma city. Last Friday, the State Department issued a long-awaited opinion that Alberta oil sands pose no inordinate ecological risk, setting in motion a permitting process that could end up with the construction of the pipeline.

As with the cacophony that accompanies the Russian variety, Keystone has seen no quiet.

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Last Friday, we discussed what happens when one adopts a my-way-or-the-highway approach to energy development, in this case opposition to Canadian oil sands. You get what we already have, which is projections of $150-a-barrel oil and $4.50-a-gallon gasoline, the product of a belief that, starting next year or soon thereafter, oil demand will start to exceed supply. This state of affairs vexes Christophe de Margerie, the CEO of France's Total oil company, who met with a small group over breakfast this morning at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "If you say no to shale oil, no to heavy oil, no to Iran -- no, no, no, no -- what about life?" de Margerie said. Oil companies must be responsible in how they work, but everyone else must grasp that they actually need oil, and will for many decades to come, he said.

De Margerie is refreshing on two fronts -- his wicked sense of humor (Note to oil CEOs: it is possible to be funny and successful) and among the clearest minds on the oil patch. When we last visited with de Margerie, he was on a similar bent -- he was saying that the world is fast approaching the maximum volume of oil it can possibly produce, which he reckons is about 95 million barrels a day; that's just 8 percentage points higher than the 88 million barrels a day the world consumes at the moment. Today, he dove deeply into the wrong-headedness of attempting, at least at the moment, to weed out large energy supplies that one will and will not accept. When it comes to oil, we need all of it.

We still want to drive our cars at will, and own all the plastic gadgets in our homes. We want to fly off to Costa Rica and Bangkok. Not incidentally, we would like our helicopter-borne armies not to worry if they wish on the spur of the moment to capture Osama bin Ladin. That is the stuff that's at risk.

So among other things, the United States would be shrewd to accept the added 500,000 barrels a day to be produced from oil sands in the Canadian province of Alberta, which has been under long scrutiny because of the pollution produced when it is mined and refined. At the same time, Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon might stop congratulating himself for a billion-dollar venture-capital subsidiary aimed at creating demand for surplus shale gas, and instead act aggressively to become super-transparent and police the bad actors who are driving doubts about his industry.

Members of OPEC will agree to increase their official production today, but that won't do much to lower prices -- the plenitude of energy-related stress across the globe underscores more than ever how power has dispersed out of OPEC's hands. It's not only the civil war in Libya, and the loss of its 1.4 million barrels a day of oil exports, or the chaos in Yemen. From the South China Sea to Alberta, Canada, tempers are flared over the control and movement of oil.

The Vietnamese, the Filipinos and the Japanese are vexed over unneighborly behavior by China, which most recently severed the seismic cables of an oil exploration ship, and fired at fishing trawlers in the South China Sea. For their part, some Chinese call their neighbors plunderers and the U.S. a hegemonist. For now, southeast Asia is more worried about U.S.-Chinese friction over these confrontations than winning the debate of the moment with Beijing, and so the Obama administration has relaxed its posture of last year, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the dispute a U.S. strategic interest. I exchanged emails on this with Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think that if Chinese intimidation of oil exploration activities continues, the U.S. will have to take a stronger stand -- especially if Exxon is involved.  But the Obama administration hopes it doesn't come to that," Glaser said.

Fighting continues in Sudan, this time in a contest over the breakaway south's oil, writes Jeffrey Gettleman at the New York Times. Southern Sudan is set to become independent next month, and Sudan President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has taken a hostage -- the entire town of Abyei -- as leverage in order to obtain more oil in the split-up. The south produces about 500,000 barrels of oil a day, and though there appears to be little chance of renewed full-out war as long as the south slices off some of that for the north, there is plenty of violence for now.

In western Pakistan, the Taliban yesterday again blew up U.S. fuel supply tankers destined for Afghanistan (pictured above). Such acts do not change the global picture, but illustrate the Taliban's understanding of the centrality of oil in running the war.

A more peaceful but still hardball struggle has gone on a long time between independent-minded Kurdistan and the central Iraqi government over control of natural gas in Kurdistan. There could be a deal yet as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki relies on Kurdish political support, writes Tamsin Carlisle at the National, but not very soon. Meanwhile Canada is grappling with the U.S. over its desire to send the bitumen from its Alberta oil sands to Gulf of Mexico refineries.

And all this excludes the impact of natural disasters, such as we may see with the summer hurricane season. So what OPEC decides will help to bump prices one way or the other, but it may not be the main determinant even today.

Update: We are getting a jump in oil prices this morning after OPEC's announced decision to punt on Saudi's proposed increase in production, and keep output where it is. Traders are engaging in opportunistic buying. This should last for a day or two until the reality of an oil glut settles in again, along with the multitude of other factors influencing prices.