Monday, January 08, 2007

It's not about oil, is it?

Every time one's sensibilities rebel against the conspiracy theory that George W. Bush sent tens of thousands of Americans to their doom in Iraq just to secure more oil for his corporate buddies, a news report like this surfaces:
Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
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Supporters say the provision allowing oil companies to take up to 75 per cent of the profits will last until they have recouped initial drilling costs. After that, they would collect about 20 per cent of all profits, according to industry sources in Iraq. But that is twice the industry average for such deals.
So, now we have to ask: if, as McClatchy News Service reports, "the No. 2 commander in Iraq conceded Sunday that a military 'surge' escalation would not be enough to rescue Iraq," what is it good for? Securing oil profits for Halliburton and Exxon-Mobil?

4 comments:

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Unknown said...

Oil reserves refer to portions of oil in place that are claimed to be recoverable under current economic constraints. Oil in the ground is not a "reserve" unless it is claimed to be economically recoverable, since as the oil is extracted, the cost of recovery increases incrementally as the amount of oil remaining is reduced. The recovery factor (RF) is the percentage of oil in place which is expected to be economically recoverable under a given set of conditions. Oil reserve estimates are ideally a measure of geological and economic risk — of the probability of oil existing and being producible under current economic conditions using current technology. The international authority for reserves definitions is generally the Society of Petroleum Engineers. sportsbook, The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission demands that oil companies with exchange listed stock adopt reserves accounting standards that are consistent with common industry practice. However these standards are based on historical production practices and are not always meaningful in dealing with deep-water and non-conventional oil fields that are becoming the source of more and more of the world's oil production. In addition, many of the world's largest oil-producing countries do not follow normal industry standards in estimating their oil reserves and do not publish any data which would allow their estimates to be verified. http://www.enterbet.com

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