Success is elusive in Iraq’s oil fields

After two years of cost overruns and attacks, American construction workers in Iraq are finally completing a stretch of pipeline deemed the country’s most critical piece of oil infrastructure.

But their success is just one small victory in the larger struggle over the fate of the oil industry in Iraq, where sophisticated acts of sabotage are threatening the country’s economic survival and eroding the $1.8 billion US investment in Iraq’s oil infrastructure, US officials and energy specialists say.

Three years after Bush administration officials predicted that oil revenues would fund the country’s reconstruction, the industry is in turmoil. Attacks that knocked out pipelines in the north have combined with bad weather in the south to drive Iraq’s oil exports last month to their lowest level since September 2003, in the aftermath of the US-led invasion.

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Nowhere is that battle more apparent than at the Tigris River crossing, in the heart of the deadly Sunni Triangle, where a US airstrike during the invasion destroyed the Al Fatha bridge but inadvertently damaged the crucial pipelines that run beneath it.

The Boston Globe