Before the recent wars, Iraq was at one point the number 3 oil producer in the world. I am surprised that we are having shortages of oil-as Iraq should becapable of 4-5 million barrels a day. Is the infrastructure so damaged that they cannot pump the oil out? SA is pumping flat out-and Russi is producing more oil than ever…so why the upsurge in crude prices? :smack:
In short… NO (at least nowhere near pre-war levels).
This is from October 2005 (I don’t beleive the situation has improved much since then).
[quote]
Iraq’s oil wells — beset by equipment problems and saboteurs — are producing about 1.9 million barrels a day in net production, lower than the 2.6 million it was producing just before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to the London-based Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES).
[quote]
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2005-10-10-iraq-oil-usat_x.htm
Well, for one, Iraq’s oil production is 900,000 barrels a day below prewar levels. That means currently they’re producing about 1.6 million barrels a day, down from 2.5 million immediately pre-Gulf War II. Back in the 80’s, they were producing 3 million barrels a day, before Gulf War I.
Big factors slowing oil production? Destruction of equipment in the war, loss of trained personnel, and heightened security fears along with insufficient security personnel at oil fields and processing sites. They are having something which approximates a civil war there now, after all.
Meanwhile, China and India are hungry for oil, and are paying hard cash for it.
Just saying that Iraq’s oil production is down is a bit misleading. Over the last twenty five years, Iraq’s oil production has been all over the place. During the Iran-Iraq war, production was anywhere from .8 to 1.6 million barrels per day. Iraq has only had two really solid years of production, 1987 and 1988, over which period it averaged about 2.8 million bpd. In the years after the Gulf War, production averaged half a million bpd for seven years. The Oil for Food program was then put in place, production went up, and then started trailing off, and was at about 2 million bpd in 2002, the last full year before the 2003 war.
Iraqi oil production in the past year has had some serious ups and downs, but in general, has floated in the general neighborhood of about 1.7 million bpd. In the last month or so, oil production has been steady in the 2.0 to 2.1 million bpd range. PDF cite. Of that, roughly 75 percent or so is exported, and the exports of Iraqi oil have been steadily climbing for months.
Of course, there’s a lot more to the story, like the production is significantly below what it could be if there were peace and a ton of investment in the infrastructure, and there’s still a significant reliance on imported petro products.
The question that you ought to be asking, ralph, is does the US get a lot of oil from Iraq? And the answer is, not really. Out of the 12 million barrels we import (that’s just imports, not domestic production) every day, we get around half a million barrels from Iraq. That’s about as much as we get from Algeria, and yet nobody says, “Wow! Algeria is sitting on a ton of oil! Why isn’t Algeria selling us more oil? I bet Bushco is going to invade Algeria to let Halliburton get at the oil!” But I digress. Suffice it to say that Venezuela, Nigeria, and a good number of other countries are much more important to the US oil supply than is Iraq.