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Oil find gives Sunnis resources comparable
to Kurd, Shiite lands
19.2.2007 |
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February 19, 2007
KARABILA, February 18, -- In a remote patch
of the Anbar desert just 20 miles from the Syrian
border, a single blue pillar of flanges and valves
sits atop an enormous deposit of oil and natural gas
that would be routine in this petroleum-rich country
except for one fact: this is Sunni territory.
Huge petroleum deposits have long been known in
Iraq’s Kurdish north and Shiite south. But now, Iraq
has substantially increased its estimates of the
amount of oil and natural gas in deposits on Sunni
lands after quietly paying foreign oil companies
tens of millions of dollars over the past two years
to re-examine old seismic data across the country
and retrain Iraqi petroleum engineers.
The development is likely to have significant
political effects: the lack of natural resources in
the central and western regions where Sunnis hold
sway has fed their disenchantment with the nation
they once ruled. And it has driven their insistence
on a strong central government, one that would
collect oil revenues and spread them equitably among
the country’s factions, rather than any division of
the country along sectarian regional boundaries.
Though Western and Iraqi engineers have always known
that there are oil formations beneath Sunni lands,
the issue is coming into sharper focus with the new
studies, senior Oil Ministry officials said. The
question of where the oil reserves are concentrated
is taking on still more importance as it appears
that negotiators are close to agreement on a
long-debated oil law that would regulate how Iraqi
and international oil companies would be allowed to
develop Iraq’s fields.
The new studies have increased estimates of the
amount of oil in a series of deposits in Sunni
territory to the north and east of Baghdad and in a
series of deposits that run through western Iraq
like beads on a string, and could contain as much as
a trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The revised
figures, though large, would not mean that deposits
in Sunni territories could challenge the giant
fields elsewhere in the country.
And while it would take years actually to begin
pulling gas and oil out of the fields even if the
area soon became safe enough for companies to work
in, energy corporations have been excited about the
area’s potential, even if it falls short of reserves
in the Shiite south and Kurdish north.
The analysis, still little known outside a small
circle of specialists, is important enough that on
Friday, Brig. Gen. John R. Allen of the Second
Marine Expeditionary Force, who is deputy commanding
general of Multi-National Force-West, which has
responsibility for Anbar Province, made the long
trip into the desert to visit the blue wellhead.
General Allen’s duties include promoting the
economic development of the province.
The deposit beneath is the Akkas field, one of the
beads on the string that runs from Ninewa Province
in the north to the border with Saudi Arabia in the
south.
“It’s phenomenal standing here,” General Allen said.
“What this does is it gives Anbar and the Sunnis an
economic future different from phosphate and
cement,” he said, referring to products of some of
the aging factories in the area.
“This gives them a future and a hope,” he said.
Nearby, a few pieces of laundry flapped in front of
one of the only structures in sight, a cinder-block
shack probably belonging to a shepherd.
Iraqi oil production peaked at around 3.7 million
barrels a day in 1979, as Saddam Hussein was coming
to power, according to the United States Department
of Energy.
The figure rose and fell over the years and stood at
2.6 million barrels a day just before the 2003
invasion. Current production is less than the prewar
figure, a major disappointment for the American and
Iraqi engineers who have struggled to rebuild the
national oil infrastructure.
That production has always been concentrated in the
north and south. But at various times Iraq has
drilled a few exploratory wells in the Anbar desert
and in a series of deposits north and east of
Baghdad, where there has also been limited
production, Natik K. al-Bayati, director of
reservoirs and field development at the Oil
Ministry, said in a recent interview.
For all of its wells, Iraq has also collected
seismic data — records of the tremors that ripple
through the earth’s crust and can be used like
X-rays to investigate underground structures.
But Iraq’s long isolation from the rest of the world
meant that the data had never been analyzed with the
latest technology, Mr. Bayati said in the interview,
which was attended by his chief geologist and
another ministry expert on reservoirs and authorized
by the oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani.
It was partly for that reason, Mr. Bayati said, that
Iraq allocated up to $25 million each for agreements
with some 40 international oil companies, which have
provided training, legal consulting and technical
help — including access to the latest software —
with the data analysis. In the process, “We got some
pleasant surprises,” he said.
A re-examination of one series of wells running from
Taji, just north of Baghdad, to an area southeast of
the capital nearly doubled the estimate of
recoverable reserves after raising the estimated
total to around 15 billion barrels, Mr. Bayati said.
That is one of a series of similar structures in
Sunni areas north of Baghdad that are still being
studied, he said. Current estimates for all proven
reserves in Iraq amount to about 115 billion
barrels, according to numerous industry and
government analysts in Iraq and the West.
Mr. Bayati said that the studies, which were
conducted across the whole country, also increased
estimates of the natural gas reserves in
Sunni-dominated Ninewa and Anbar Provinces in the
west. He said that the amount of natural gas that
could theoretically be extracted from the Akkas
field alone would be the energy equivalent of around
100,000 barrels of oil a day.
In the past, some Western oil experts have
speculated that as much as 100 billion barrels of
additional crude oil could be found in deep
formations in Anbar, but investigating those
structures would probably require new seismic
testing with equipment on the ground, a difficult
task given the dangers of working in Iraq at the
moment.
Akkas is expected to be among a small number of
fields to be given priority in Iraq’s development
plan once the oil law is passed.
Although Mr. Bayati was initially reluctant to
discuss the political implications of oil and gas
reserves in Sunni territory, he eventually conceded
that the impact was likely to spread beyond the
arcane world of oil engineering. “Eventually one has
to deal with reality on the ground,” he said.
The work has not gone unnoticed elsewhere in
Baghdad.
“It could be a real positive,” a senior United
States official said about the Akkas field. “There
are people who believe it could be quite large.”
The official said that more work needed to be done,
including new seismic measurements to better map the
fields.
The potential of the gas fields has also caught the
attention of some in the American military command,
including General Allen, who believes that the
natural gas could be used to generate electricity
and serve as a raw material at chemical plants in
Anbar.
The promise of the oil and gas fields in Sunni
territory comes with numerous cautions, including
the challenges of doing almost anything with the
fields as long as Iraq remains such a dangerous
place to work, particularly for foreign companies
with substantial expertise.
Even if companies can develop the fields, it could
be years before the necessary wells can be dug and
pipelines built to move the oil and gas from the
fields.
But the novelty of oil resources on Sunni territory
has certainly caught the fancy of those the finds
could affect the most. Farhan T. Farhan, the mayor
of Qaim, which is the nearest populated area to
Akkas, said in an interview that he already had his
eye on the possible economic benefits of developing
the field.
“If we use this petroleum,” he said, “it will be
enough for all the west of Iraq.”
nytimes com
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