The Oil Drum

12 comments on Oil Talk, C-Span, Sunday 9:30am EDT

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Darwinian on May 20, 2007 - 9:09am

I watched the show and found it quite interesting though not much new was revealed. The guest, a supposed expert on Iraqi affairs, suggested that there were vast areas of Iraq that had not been explored for oil. He said that there ware approximately 100 billion barrels of oil yet to be found in Western Iraq.

There are currently no oil fields in Western Iraq, just as there are none just across the border in Saudi Arabia in that area. All maps of the oilfields in Saudi and Iraq show the oil fields petering out the further west you go. I would suggest that there is a very good reason for that and that reason is not that the area is unexplored. The primary reason no oil fields have been found in that area is that the geological formation is just not conducive to the formation of oil.

One more very interesting the gentleman pointed out was in answer to the recent claim of the New York Times that from 100,000 to 300,000 barrels per day just go missing from Iraqi oil production. The gentleman agreed that some of it is siphoned off and sold on the black market. But he pointed out, quite correctly I think, that no one really knows just how much oil is produced every day in Iraq. Therefore, he suggested, that most of that oil was simply never produced in the first place. It was just the difference between the inflated production numbers and the amount of oil actually delivered to exporters and domestic buyers.

Ron Patterson

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rainsong on May 20, 2007 - 9:51am

Before the Iraq war, the Iraqis had a UN food for oil program. The Republicans indicated the program was corrupt and did away with it. The program was distributing food rations to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis each month. These people may have felt betrayed when their oil was taken from them and seized by Bush's people. The food for oil did not cause them to give up working for a living, but was generally used to supplement their income.

This preemptive war to take out Sadaam's alleged nuclear weapons program has proved to be an unnecessary waste of tax payer's money. The CIA and UN had warned before the war that documents indicating Sadaam was seeking uranium in Niger were forged. The invasion of Iraq has caused a lack of confidence in the Republican leadership.

It has been said that things were bad under Sadaam, but now they are much worse. Hundreds of thousands fled Iraq into areas already suffering crowding and poverty. Sadaam was not using Iraq as a base. It was a movement compatible with the Taliban of Afghanistan who were extremely militant in their interpretation of Islam.

People in the United States indicated they believed Bush deliberately lied to them. The leaders of Italy, Spain, and Britain who called for the war in Iraq have been turned out of office by the voters of those countries. The Republicans (US) were net losers in the past Novemeber election.