The Real Cost Of Making Oil Flow In Iraq
European oilmen in Baghdad realise now that Iraqi officials in the oil ministry knew very well that the sabotage was going to occur and that there would be no oil exports from the north. The sabotage had obviously been planned long before the invasion in March.
When the US attacked Iraq in March, the country was producing 2.7 million barrels a day. Presently, oil production is 780,000 barrels (from the southern oil fields) and rarely does production reach a million. Paul Bremer is "sexing up" oil production figures, gaving the impression that production stood at 1.5 million barrels a day.
Mr Bremer's occupation administrators have secretly decided that well over half the $20 billion earmarked for Iraq's (reconstruction) will go towards security for its production infrastructure.
During the war, a detailed analysis by Yahya Sadowski, a professor at the American University of Beirut, suggested that repairing wells and pipes would cost $1 billion, that raising oil production to 3.5 million barrels a day would take three years and cost another $8 billion investment and another $20 billion for repairs to the electrical grid which powers the pumps and refineries. Bringing production up to six million barrels a day would cost a further $30 billion, some say up $100 billion.
In other words--assuming only $8 billion of the $20 billion can be used on industry--the Bush overall budget of $87 billion which now horrifies Congress is likely to rise towards a figure of $200 billion.
In addition, billions of dollars of irreplaceable seismic and drilling data was destroyed by looter. In the very first hours after they entered Baghdad on 9 April, American troops allowed looters into the oil ministry. By the time senior officers arrived to order them out, the data had been destroyed.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0930-09.htm
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