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