Iraq Oil Report

Plus:
*Oil city Amarah awaits Basra incursion redux
*Iraq agrees to Jordan cheaper oil extension
*Oil for education
*Birth defects rise in Fallujah babies
* Kurdistan’s muckrakers

The pipeline that could pump northern Iraqi oil for export is nearly complete but empty, ending for now in the soil near the borders with Syria and Turkey, on the side of a dirt road.

Across the dirt road are the buried pipelines that carry oil from Iraq’s second-largest oil hub, Kirkuk, to the Iraqi government’s oil export metering station guarded by Iraqi Kurdish forces less than a half mile up the dirt road, and on to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, Ben Lando reports for United Press International.

Norwegian company DNO’s oil and the idled pipeline await the outcome of ongoing negotiations between the Kurdistan Regional Government and the federal Iraqi government to give it permission to export.

Both sides’ oil officials say they are ready to sign an export deal, but there has been no agreement yet. If one is reached, it could add 1 million barrels per day to the market within five years — half of Iraq’s total exports now — according to KRG estimates.

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Iraqi reinforcements arrived in the oil-producing southern city of Amarah on Thursday as the military geared up for another crackdown against Shiite militia fighters, officials said, Qassim Abdul-Zahra reports for The Associated Press.

Abdul-Zahra also reports new U.S. proposals have failed to overcome Iraqi opposition to a proposed security pact, two lawmakers said Thursday, and a senior government official expressed doubt an agreement could be reached before the U.S. presidential election in November.

Iraq agreed to renew a 2006 deal to sell discounted oil to Jordan for three years, Jordanian Prime Minister Nader Dahabi said after talks with his visiting Iraqi counterpart Nuri al-Maliki, Agence France-Presse reports. Iraq agreed in August 2006 to provide Jordan with between 10 and 30 percent of its daily oil needs of around 100,000 barrels at a preferential price starting from September of that year, but deliveries by road began a year late. Jordan was paying Iraq 18 dollars a barrel less than the August 2006 price for its discounted deliveries. Oil was trading at the time at around the 75-dollar mark on world markets.

Although some oil sales made it to Jordan this year, security on the main roads from Baiji are not safe enough to keep the discounted exports consistent.

The Iraqi government has proposed using oil revenues to send 10,000 high school graduates a year to study abroad – for the next five years. The students would go to the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia, with the bulk of them headed here. Then they would be required to return home, Trudy Rubin writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Iraq has been bleeding human capital for three decades: in the 1980s from Saddam’s Iran-Iraq war, in the 1990s from sanctions and since 2003 from postwar chaos. Without skilled manpower, Iraq can’t pull itself back together, even if the civil war ends, al-Qaeda in Iraq disappears and American troops leave. Oil money can keep the country afloat, but it won’t develop into a modern nation without a solid educational base.

Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say, Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail report for Inter Press Service. The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after “special weaponry” was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.

Kurdistan’s muckraking media test free speech limits, Sam Dagher reports for The Christian Science Monitor. Editors and reporters risk jail time as they expose cronyism and push Iraqi leaders for reforms.

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