"Iraq's oil promise unfulfilled?"
The New York Times
With vast reservoirs of oil and the potential to rival Saudi Arabia, Iraq long has tantalized the world's energy industry.
But the new Iraqi government's glaring failure last week to agree on an oil minister and the sectarian bargaining over this crucial appointment, as well as the unabated insurgency, have been new reminders of the political faults that keep the country's petroleum promise unrealized.
"Unfortunately, oil in Iraq is being politicized more and more," Issam al-Chalabi, who was Iraq's oil minister in the late 1980s, told a conference of scholars and oil company executives in Washington in late April. "This is dangerous."
Chalabi, now a consultant based in Jordan and Baghdad, is not related to Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile who has been appointed interim oil minister.
As recently as April, a senior Iraqi leader evoked the eternal dream that Iraq could produce 10 million barrels a day - close to the Saudi levels - within 10 years to 15 years.
Far less progress than that could alter the global oil market and aid consumers everywhere. But production is limping along at about 2 million barrels a day, less than before the war, and even at that rate it may be causing long-term damage to poorly maintained fields.
U.S. officials had hoped that output at this stage would be at 3 million barrels a day, generating funds for reconstruction. That level of production also could reduce oil prices, a global source of inflationary pressure. But close to $2 billion worth of U.S. aid to the oil sector has brought only limited gains.
Sabotage of a pipeline to Turkey has choked off exports from Iraq's northern fields, around Kirkuk, and violence has slowed efforts to renovate the larger southern fields.
But even if the insurgency is tamed, oil experts say, Iraq will never receive the foreign investment and advanced technologies it needs until the country has a strategy and laws, ideally enshrined in a constitution, for developing hydrocarbons.
Whatever pattern Iraq chooses, it must be clearly delineated, industry executives say, with protections for foreign investors.
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/05/02/a2.int.oil.0502.html
Thanks so much for that info, I don't read the NYTimes and could not find any info anywhere. Closest I ever heard anything was Alan Colmes asking about the oil and nobody answered his question.