Iraq: On the Verge of Collapse

…Experts describe the condition of the oil wells themselves in even more dramatic terms. Saddam began a policy of overexploitation of Iraq’s oil resources in the 1980s that included neglecting to replace depleted oil with gas or water to maintain the necessary pressure in the wells. Many of the approximately 850 oil wells in southern Iraq are now “dead” and, with the exception of the West Kurna reservoir, all so-called super-giant fields are exhausted, writes oil engineer Abd al-Jabbar al-Halfi. “We milked them like cows — but without giving them anything to eat.”

After the fall of the Saddam regime, Iraq’s oil technocrats hoped for a turnaround — but in vain. “The new government is also constantly demanding that we step up oil production, even though our equipment is outdated and primitive, the situation at the oil wells is deteriorating and the pipelines are corroding,” says Halfi.

Whereas the insurgency has hampered reconstruction in central Iraq, the southern part of the country has been relatively secure until now, and yet little has been achieved. On the eve of the war, Iraq was pumping about 2.5 million barrels of crude oil per day. In the first three months of this year, the rate of export was just over 1.7 billion barrels — a far cry from the predictions the Americans had given the Iraqis after the invasion, when US officials were talking about production levels of more than 6 million barrels a day by 2010.

The failure of the Southern Oil Company is politically explosive material in Iraq’s ethnically and religiously heated climate. In February, the company’s 15,000 workers and engineers sent an urgent letter to Baghdad, in which they accused the government of “deliberately” neglecting their company. “Our company,” the letter read, “has the world’s largest oil reserves — but we have yet to find someone who will listen to us.” The regime in Baghdad, the oil company employees wrote, even spent months blocking the decision to lease a pair of new, more powerful tugboats so that large oil tankers could be safely guided into the terminals in rough weather.

Spiegel