Still waiting to cash in on Iraq’s oil
“You would need a very stable, long-term legal environment” for the big western oil companies to invest the tens of billion of dollars needed to really ramp up production there, said Greg Priddy, a global energy analyst at the Eurasia group, a political risk consultancy. “Everyone sees this as a long-term opportunity, but they have to get the political situation sorted out first.”
Iraqi lawmakers attempted earlier this year to pass a law governing the way oil contracts and revenues are managed. But the law got bogged down in parliament after Kurds objected to the greater control it gave the central government in allotting oil contracts and doling out royalties. The Iraqi public – and many lawmakers – also saw it as giving away the county’s oil reserves to foreign firms.
Critics of the proposed oil law said it gave foreign firms control over production on individual fields and did not require them to hire Iraqi workers or share technology.
“It really is a dream law for the companies,” said Antonia Juhasz, a fellow at the research and advocacy group Oil Change International. “And privatization is not viewed as a good thing by most Iraqis.”
But the law could impose high royalties, such as the 90 percent tax on oil profits in places like Russia and Libya, which would return most of the money to the Iraqi people. Some analysts say passing a national oil law and opening up the country to foreign firms is essential.
“The sort of investment they would need would be tens of billion of dollars,” said Priddy. “It would be very difficult for them to do that on their own.”
But others say the Iraq national oil company could do the job themselves, given the resources to invest, renewed training overseas, and, of course, a more peaceful environment.
it’s not happening on its own. It will require massive outside investment. And everyone can see how bad an investment Iraq is by looking at our expenditures.
what the neo-cons wanted in Iraq, it does seem to me that they got more chaos than they bargained for.
Four and a half years later the Iraqi oil is still not flowing, nor is it in the possession of US corporations.
We are two years into peak oil, with the US economy starting to unravel, and still the Iraqi oil is out of reach. There is a window here that is starting to close: The further the US moves into collapse, the less ability it will have to enforce arbitrary claims to foreign resources.
Those monster US bases in Iraq just get bigger and bigger, but so far the only thing they can defend is their own perimeter. The smaller bases can’t even do that.
The economic strategy of Shock and Awe works out a lot differently in the Middle East than it does in New Orleans . . .