Iraq Oil Report

This week was filled with the Petraeus/Crocker/Congress/Bush/benchmark circus. It’s Friday and the Iraq Oil Report will now refrain (OK, I’ll have some good links at the end of today’s report).

The three rings barely touched on oil anyway, with the administration touting the dissemination of oil revenue as a sign of success and Congress pointing to the Iraqi government not passing an oil law as a sign of failure. Neither take into account how weighty the discussions over the law are and its importance to the future of Iraq.

But outside of the bureaucracy, be it Washington or Baghdad, there are real bullets and bombs that clearly demarcate policy and practice in Iraq’s energy sector.

The following is data of attacks the energy sector has faced from April 2003 through the third week of August 2007, according to an expert in threats and vulnerability to the energy sector worldwide who only speaks on condition of anonymity. The source, who has been thoroughly vetted and utilized by UPI, stresses the data is only derived aggregating open source information. “My number underestimates the total number of attacks by an amount I cannot know,” the source told me.

OIL SECTOR
Pipelines: 550 incidents, an estimated 3-5 percent of which affect multiple pipelines by single or multiple attacks.
Refineries: 65 incidents, including attacks on tank farms and any area within the perimeter fence.
Tankers: incidents — tank car – 1; tanker trucks – 287; maritime tankers – 6.
Fields and wells: 23 incidents
Workers (security personnel, drivers, etc.): 641

POWER SECTOR
Lines and towers: 85 incidents (“This number does not even come close to the actual number of attacks on these assets,” the source said. “For the most part, attacks on them go unreported or at best reported in ways such that it is not possible to determine where the attack(s) occurred; what exactly was hit … it is likely there have been thousands of attacks on these assets for purposes of sabotaging the national grid, for metal theft, or for extorting or attempting to extort higher fees for protecting them.”)
Stations and generators: incidents — thermal – 63; hydro – 5
Substations: 13 incidents
Workers: 318 (“This number I know is low. The available accounts describe the victims in ways it is difficult to know how many were actually attacked. … I estimate the real number of victims is about twice what I have in the data base.”)

A new Energy Profile of Iraq by Energy Publisher

A $9B game of hide (not too much) seek

Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele report in the October issue of Vanity Fair about the $9 billion shipped from the U.S. Federal Reserve to Baghdad that is not accounted for. Where did the money come from? Some of it was U.S. tax pay; most was Iraq’s own oil revenue.

As the gulf between Baghdad and Irbil widens, Gareth Jenkins writes in The Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor a key investor in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey, is being squeezed.

Guntekin Koksal of the Turkish oil company Petoil noted that their local joint venture had begun drilling for oil in northern Iraq’s Bin Bavi field in August 2006, but they were finding it difficult to export the oil along the existing pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Yumurtalik.
“In order to transport the oil we need to use the Kirkuk-Yumurtalik pipeline but we can’t because the necessary agreement hasn’t been signed with Turkey,” said Koksal.

People, Politics and Security

Baghdad residents want their homes to be protected from militants

Lt. Col. Michael Eisenstadt, Middle East foreign area officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, on the need to engage tribes and sheiks in order to attain support of many of the Iraqi people. Initial U.S. m.o.: ignore because they weren’t “democratic.”

An insightful piece by George Packer in the New Yorker titled Planning for Defeat: How should we withdraw from Iraq?

Two great pieces by Reidar Visser, research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and editor of the Iraq website www.historiae.org:

It Is the Partition of Iraq that Would Be Truly “Artificial” published in the History News Network

The Surge, the Shiites and Nation Building in Iraq in The Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor

The Iraq Press Roundup by UPI’s Hiba Dawood

And here’s the long awaited perspective you need on the aforementioned circus:

Iraq Slogger compares the White House’s benchmarks report with the GAO version.

Two pieces from the U.S. Institute of Peace:

Seven Months Into the Surge:What Does It Mean For Iraqis? by Senior Fellow Rend al-Rahim Francke

Iraq: Time for a Change by Daniel Serwer, vice president of the Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations and the Centers of Innovation

———