Wednesday, May 28, 2014
And speaking of Big Oil
All that Iraqi oil that was supposed to pay for Bush's Marvelous Little War can not, 3 years after, yet provide much support for the Iraqi government.
The revival in Iraqi oil output has stalled. Again.At this rate they may well end up the only nation with any oil left because they couldn't get it out of the ground fast enough to use it all up with the others.
Production forecasts for 2014 are getting less optimistic. The Oil Ministry’s official target is 4 million barrels a day by the end of the year. More likely it will be 3.75 million, Thamir Ghadhban, an adviser to the prime minister, said in an interview May 14. Or perhaps 3.4 million, about the same as last month, according to the average of six analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg News.
Violence and conflict are pinching growth for OPEC’s second-biggest member. While Iraq added about 2 million barrels to daily production since 2003, the year of Saddam Hussein’s ouster, attacks on pipelines and an oil-revenue dispute with the semi-autonomous Kurdish region are diminishing the country’s dependability as a supplier. They’re also contributing to making oil more expensive, VTB Capital said.
“Iraq always seems to be the producer of the future,” Mike Wittner, head of oil market research at Societe Generale SA in New York, said by phone May 13. “The entire world has been upbeat on Iraq’s prospects for the last couple of years. But it’s not steady growth. They have to get the security situation sorted out, or that’s going to continue to hamper them.”
Iraq’s exports to Europe have been curbed since early March because of sabotage on its northern pipeline to Turkey. New supplies from the Kurdish region are mostly halted because of the dispute with the central government.
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