Oil - Demand, Supply, and President Bush, pt 8
Posted by Moonage on 02 Sep 2004 | Tagged as: Oil Supply
TMFOtter : Iraq’s oil shipments to the US and worldwide are substantially higher today than they have been in the past decade.
A decade is a long time and IMHO not really relevant in trying to estimate the effect of the 2003 war on oil production/pricing. It would be better to compare with the period since the oil-for-food program was installed. I don’t think one can then claim there is a “substantial increase” in oil output from Iraq compared to pre-war levels.
Historically, Iraqi production peaked in December 1979 at 3.7 million bbl/d, and then in July 1990, just prior to its invasion of Kuwait, at 3.5 million bbl/d. From 1991, Iraqi oil output increased slowly, to 600,000 bbl/d in 1996. With Iraq’s acceptance in late 1996 of U.N. Resolution 986, which allowed limited Iraqi oil exports in exchange for food and other supplies (”oil-for-food”), the country’s oil output began increasing more rapidly, to 1.2 million bbl/d in 1997, 2.2 million bbl/d in 1998, and around 2.5 million bbl/d during 1999-2001. Between December 1996 and March 20, 2003, some 3.4 billion barrels of Iraqi oil valued at about $65 billion were exported under the oil-for-food program
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During 2003, Iraqi oil production averaged 1.33 million bbl/d, down from 2.04 million bbl/d in 2002, 2.45 million bbl/d in 2001, and 2.69 million bbl/d in 2000. Iraqi monthly oil output increased in the last few months of 2002 and into early 2003, peaking at around 2.58 million bbl/d in January 2003, just before the war. As of early March 2004, Iraqi production (on a net basis) had reached perhaps 2.2 million bbl/d, with “gross” production (including reinjection) of around 2.4 million bbl/d. Although Iraq is a member of OPEC, its oil output has not been constrained by OPEC quotas since it resumed oil exports in December 1996
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The news snippet below recently appeared in Yahoo! news. I won’t vouch for this source’s accuracy as it is an Indian newspaper totally unknown to me.
[World News] Kuwait City, Aug 21 (IANS) :
Iraqi oil export is currently averaging 800,000 to one million barrels per day from its stock that is close to being exhausted, Xinhua reports.
There is no production of oil now in Basra and what is being exported is from previously produced and stored oil, an Iraqi South Oil Company source was quoted by the Kuwait News Agency as saying.
The source in Basra added this stock is on its way to exhaustion.
South Oil Company spokesman Samir Jasem refused to specify the volume of exported oil, saying, “A lot of what is being reported is false.”
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T.
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