Iraq Oil Report

Plus:
*Electricity Ministry official assassinated
*Iraq, Oil and The Washington Post
*The Betrayal of Judge Radhi
*Basra police bust women assassin’s ring
*Kuwait to Iraq: debt relief for water
*Iraq Five Years of War: continuing coverage
*Much, much more…

Royal Dutch Shell has been quietly working with Iraq’s oil ministry over the past two years, advising it on how to increase the production of two oilfields, Roula Khalaf and Steve Negus write in an excellent Financial Times article.

Under an agreement struck after the 2003 invasion, no one from the company, Europe’s largest oil group, has set foot in the troubled country; instead, monthly face-to-face meetings with the oil ministry have been held in Amman, the Jordanian capital, and weekly contact has been maintained by video-link.

With parts of the global oil industry threatened with nationalisation and much of the Middle East still closed to foreign ownership of reserves, access to Iraq, with the world’s third-largest oil reserves, has long been viewed as a huge prize. Although no decision has yet been made in Baghdad over the nature of the development or the eventual exploration contracts that will be on offer, Iraq could prove one of the rare countries in the region where companies will be allowed to claim reserves as their own. “This is the big frontier,” says Raad Alkadiri, a senior director at Washington-based PFC Energy.

Unknown gunmen abducted a senior official of the Iraq Electricity Ministry near a town in Salahudin province, a provincial police source said on Thursday, the Xinhua news agency reports.

It seems appropriate to spend a moment reflecting on the road not taken, at least in terms of its energy aspects, blogs energy and strategy consultant Geoffrey Styles. This week marks the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War as the outcome of November’s US presidential election hinging at least in part on the judgment to go to war in 2003 and a book by a Nobel-winning economist assessing the cost of the war is released. Although we will never know what would have ultimately happened, had the US decided not to invade Iraq, we can make some educated guesses about the level of oil prices in such a world. Just as the war itself cannot properly be characterized as a war for oil–though it has certainly been about oil–today’s oil price of $110 per barrel reflects the results of that decision, though it has not been directly caused by it.

In gauging the impact of the Iraq War on oil prices, we need to evaluate two broad areas: the relative importance of Iraqi under-production, compared to all the other factors that have contributed to oil’s dramatic rise from the mid-$20s per barrel, and the nature of Iraq’s status quo ante, with regard to oil. Let’s start with the latter, since after five years of war, most commentators have forgotten about the way that Saddam Hussein’s behavior regularly roiled the market.

Iraq’s Oil Ministry has signed a contract with the Colorado Industrial Construction Services Co. to help expand a refinery in Najaf, south of Baghdad, The Associated Press reports. The US$85 million contract is designed to increase the refinery’s current production of 20,000 barrels of oil per day by roughly 10,000 barrels per day, a senior ministry official said.

Iraq, Oil and The Washington Post: Steven Mufson follows up his article, A Crude Case for War?, with a Q & A with readers. The Post also publishes a response/analysis of Mufson’s piece by Harper’s Magazine senior editor Luke Mitchell.

Security, Society & Politics

The Betrayal of Judge Radhi: How America turned its back on its top fraud cop in Iraq, a profile by Christopher S. Stewart in the Conde Nast Portfolio of the former U.S.-picked Iraqi judge charged with finding Iraqi corruption and, incidentally, he found American contracting graft as well. He soon became a target of the Iraqi government and militias, accused of corruption himself, and is struggling to be approved for asylum here in the U.S.

Basra police say they captured a gang responsible for serial murders of women, Abed Battat reports for Azzaman.

The Kuwaiti delegation participating in the Arab Parliamentary Union Conference, which concluded its work in Arbil last Friday, said it had an idea of dropping his country’s debt on Iraq in return for providing it with Shatt al-Arab water surplus.

A member of Iraq’s Presidency Council, whose objections had blocked a law calling for provincial elections by October, withdrew his objections on Wednesday in a sudden turnaround that raised hopes for long-sought political progress, Erica Goode and Richard A. Oppel Jr. report for The New York Times.

This refers to the provincial powers law – which is not an election law but a law establishing the authorities of the provinces and includes mention of a future election – which was initially approved along with two other laws, as United Press International’s Ben Lando reported in February.

The U.N.’s Antonio Maria Costa asked the Government of Iraq to implement the United Nations Convention against Corruption without delay, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said in a statement.

How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic, Noah Shachtman reports for Wired.

Five Years in Iraq coverage

Through their eyes, CNN’s Arwa Damon tells us how she managed to show us the world of Iraqi women through their own eyes. After watching this, a good read would be Iraq Progress Misses Women, by UPI’s Ben Lando.

Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War, a well-documented multimedia recap by the great team at Reuters.

Hidden Iraq: Jon Snow of Britain’s Channel 4 examines the brutal reality of life inside post-invasion Iraq, meeting a variety of its citizens from victims of bomb blasts and war widows to human rights activists and politicians.

Iraq and the EU: five years on, by Renata Goldirova in the EU Observer.

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