Fear and Loothing on the Iraqi Trail - Page 2
July 10, 2008 @ 9:49 AM
After all, Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves, which is more than five times the total in the US. What’s more, because of its long geo-political isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations, with only two thousand wells having been drilled across the entire country, as opposed to the state of Texas that has over a million. It has been estimated by the Council on Foreign Relations that Iraq may have a further 220–300 billion barrels of undiscovered oil. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
Therefore it comes as no surprise that in early 2007, Iraq’s massive oil reserves were thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law approved by the Iraqi parliament. The US government was, of course, involved in drawing up the law, which gives big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allows the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
In 1999, the US Vice-President Dick Cheney, but who was at that time chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, suggested that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. When asked where these increased supplies would come from, he replied: “The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies”.
Obviously a man of vision.
