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26 comments on EB: US gov't awareness of peak oil

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Fire Temple on September 3, 2005 - 4:16pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Peak oil is one reason given for why Bush & Cheney wanted to invade Iraq so bad.
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Dave Cohen on September 3, 2005 - 4:49pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Guess that hasn't worked out!
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Fire Temple on September 3, 2005 - 5:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Yeah Dave, I think they had envisioned US & UK oil companies heavily engagd in exploration and production in Iraq by now.  Controlling the world's second largest oil reserves would give any government great power in the post-peak era.
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abelardlindsay on September 5, 2005 - 9:50pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The war in Iraq has actually been a success.  The U.S population, and certainly the anti-Bush crowd does not understand global commodity finance.  Let me explain how world oil markets really work.  People don't understand that most oil in the US is imported from Canada and Mexico and Venezuela.  So why does it matter what happens to middle east oil?  That's because oil is a global market.  It's all one big pot that is traded on the comex exchange.  That's why if Katrina shuts down oil production in the gulf of mexico, the oil price in India is raised, even though they get most of their oil from the Persian gulf.

 The key thing that everything hinges on though is that oil is priced in dollars.  If oil is priced in dollars all the oil in the world belongs to the United States and is given out to other countries at our discression.  The War in Iraq prevented Iraq from joining the Iranian Oil Market in Feb 2006 that would be denominated in Euros which would have undermined the U.Ss ability to print its way out of oil shortage to the detriment of the other world economy's consumption.  So with Iraq and the Saudis on our side we can prevent the Iranian oil market from gaining a strong foothold.  The war in Iraq was expensive but the end of the petro dollar would have been catastrophic.  

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mw on September 3, 2005 - 7:52pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Well that experiment certainly did not pan out.

Speaking of Iraq, more on the latest pipeline bombing there:

Posted GMT 9-3-2005 17:37:44

KIRKUK, Iraq (Reuters) -- All exports of Iraq's Kirkuk crude oil through a major pipeline to Ceyhan on Turkey's Mediterranean coast were stopped on Saturday after a bomb blast set the pipeline on fire, an oil ministry source said.

Although the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline has a nominal capacity of close to 1.5 million barrels per day, throughput has typically averaged only around 200,000 bpd since the U.S. invasion of March 2003 because of frequent attacks on the line. It has also been closed for long periods.

By 2:30 p.m. (1030 GMT) the fire had been extinguished, a fire department official from Iraq's North Oil Company told Reuters. But he added that oil leaking from the pipeline had spilled some 2 km (1.2 miles) from the site of the explosion.

It was not immediately clear how long it would take to repair the line and bring it back to full capacity.

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26 comments on EB: US gov't awareness of peak oil

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