“Iraq has many underexplored and underexploited fields, but who can tell what’s going to be happening with Iraq?” said Paul Sullivan, economics professor at the National Defence University in Washington, DC.
The remark was made in a recent discussion on energy, security and development at the Centre for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan.
Sullivan, who is also an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University, said most of the major oil finds over the last century were made in the 1960s and 1970s, adding that any further discoveries will not come easy.
“Oil is finished, it’s over with, it’s done,” he said.
An oil refinery in Iraq’s western desert has resumed production, as part of an outreach to an area once controlled by Sunni insurgents, Sinan Salaheddin writes for the Associated Press.
The refinery, located near the Syrian border in the once-violent Anbar Province, was closed in 2005 due to deteriorating security. Its rehabilitation is part of efforts by the Shiite-led government to boost services and win loyalties in the nation’s Sunni heartland.
The refinery is expected to generate local jobs and meet needs for fuel and other petroleum products in the region, which was once the main stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq.
As head of one of the country’s three state-owned oil companies, Sheikh Manaa Abdullah Alobaydi is one of the most important people in northern Iraq. He is such a major figure that the government won’t let him and Hunar Najeeb Hassan, director general of Northern Gas Co., travel outside Iraq at the same time.
Yet unlike so many powerful men in Iraq, the two company leaders studiously avoid politics, which both consider the bane of their existence. While lawmakers in Baghdad debate how to divvy up Iraq’s mineral wealth, the country depends upon apolitical oil and natural gas experts like them to keep that wealth flowing, reports James Warden with Stars and Stripes.
The European Union is negotiating an energy pact with the Iraqi government, part of the bloc’s efforts to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas. Iraq has the world’s third largest proven reserves of oil and in late June opened key producing fields to foreign investment, Tim Cocks with Reuters says.
Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer said that oil leases he helped obtain for a former employer in the Kurdish region of Iraq didn’t undermine that country’s stability, and he strongly defended them as a boon to the Kurds as well as U.S. interests in the region, Michael Riley with The Denver Post reports.
In his most extensive comments yet on the subject, the former three-term congressman also clarified what he knew of U.S. State Department warnings that such leases were counterproductive to the American goal of a strong central government in Iraq.
The election plans remain snared in one of Iraq’s thorniest political dilemmas: the future of the oil-rich northern region of Kirkuk.
Iraq’s Kurds, who control a semi-autonomous region in the north, have held up parliament passage of a law to allocate funds and set guidelines for the provincial elections, writes Brian Murphy with the Associated Press.
I think Sullivan is one of those guys who love to make outrageous statements just to get attention, but their words actually hold little or no water.
Oil is “finished”? Get real. There is more than a Saudi Arabia of oil in shale in the United States that hasn’t even begun to be tapped; not to mention colossal reserves of coal that could be converted to fuel; not to mention colossal reserves of oil in sands in Canada; not to mention colossal reserves of oil in Iraq that haven’t even been explored yet: some estimates are 3 times what Saudi Arabia has, and the oil of the highest quality and easy to extract.
Thanks to Bush getting rid of Saddam Hussein (and no thanks to democrats in Congress), Iraq is now able to make her oil available on the world market, just when it is needed most.
Sullivan is full of hot air.