Iraq: home to 11 percent of the world's oil

VIENNA (AFP) Apr 06, 2003
With 112 billion barrels of oil still sitting untapped in its soil, Iraq is home to 11 percent of the world's oil reserves, London's Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES) estimates.

It has some 2,000 oil wells which pump out about 2.5 million barrels of oil per day from the 15 main oil deposits in the north, south and east of the country.

The actual capacity of the wells is estimated to be higher still at some 2.8 million barrels per day.

Iraq has 12 oil refinaries with a total capacity of 677,000 barrels per day, the biggest being Bassora in the south and Baiji in the north, which can respectively put out 170,000 and 150,000 barrels per day.

Before the 1991 Gulf War, it exported its oil through four pipelines to Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia and two ports in the Gulf, of which the one at Min-Al-Bakr can accomodate supertankers and ship out up to 1.3 barrels per day.

Most oil experts say however that Iraq's oil infrastrure is ramshackle.

This is due to the damage of the Gulf War, the exodus of the local industry's best technicians and the sanctions the United Nations slapped on Iraq in 1990 for invading Kuwait.

The sanctions have also prevented Iraq from importing the equipment needed to maintain and develop its oil installations.

CGES says it would take about five billion dollars (4.8 billion euros) to update the infrastructure.

It estimates that in order to double the country's oil output by exploiting the virgin fields of Majnoon and West Qurna, in the south, about 20 billion dollars would have to be invested.

The oil fields are in the hands of a state enterprise, Iraq's National Oil Company, which has signed production contracts with Russian, Cyrian, Algerian and Chinese companies, as well as France's TotalFinaElf.

But these contracts cannot be honoured unless the UN sanctions against Baghdad are lifted.

Since the UN's "Oil for Food" programme was implemented in 1996, Iraq has exported 3.6 billion barrels of oil.

This programme, which was designed to limit the impact of the sanctions on the Iraqi population, was suspended on March 18, just before the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

The UN Security Council voted 10 days later to renew the programme under the sole charge of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, but Baghdad rejected the decision.

It argued that only Iraq could run the programme and that the government would not let itself be bypassed.

SPACE.WIRE