"CRUDE" oil, an absolute must see program !!!

Energy crisis solved

I believe Rick and Fred have solved our energy crisis!

No more burying or burning dead obese human bodies - we will boil them down for oil (like they used to do with whales) after any re-useable organs have been removed - and run diesel engines on the product!!

I have about 2000 kilometres around my middle, I am sure.

Hey - it worked in the film 'Matrix'!!

 

and "Soyulent Green" Who cares ablut spelling if you know you will be useful in the "afterlife" even if you don't get the invite upstairs

 

weve had enough,,,,,get readdy for the shock,,we are gonna start drilling our own oil,,,,leaving the saudies and arab emmerants behind ,they only have a few years of oil left,,,,,comes a time when enviornment gives way to nessesity,,,,mark my words,,,,,longliner

 

WHY NOT PROCESS ALL THOSE HIGHLY FLAMMABLE BUSHES (sorry caps lock on & too lazy to fix) , lit to make a backburn/firebreak... the1's separator could put you both in the oil business...

Look at his post on the "turpentine" infused bushes (not "W", but he might be useful too if rendered down... rw - need them FRESH not nice when they are all smelly and rotting. . and frozen - needs too much heat th thaw then render...

 

A guy in scotland who worked at an abbotoir used to bring all the waste bits (offal, scraps etc) back to his house, stick them all in a home made 'generator'. As the stuff breaks down (rots) it generates a real lot of heat.
You have to have reeeealllly good neighbours though as I understand it!

 

its called compost,,,and it can get over 200 degrees if mixed right. and LL,,we are drilling,,,everyday,, have been for 5 years that i know of (thats how long i been in the "land of non-skid),,,and i dont have the money to start drilling Mas. it takes a million dollars a week to drill,,,and well,,,my "meds" take priority hehe

 

Pipelineistan, Part 1: The Rules of the Game

Thanks Fred, for bringing this forum conversation back on trac. (I do wish a few of these folks would take there extraneous conversations over to the "Drivel Thread")

I worked for a short while in the offshore oil business in SE Asia. It can prove interesting to read about some of these world oil problems as seen from other viewpoints than the USA sources. A fellow named 'trouty' brought these to our attention once before...interesting reading

Pipelineistan, Part 1: The Rules of the Game
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/DA25Ag01.html

War against terrorism? Not really. Reminder: it's all about oil.

A quick look at the map is all it takes. It's no coincidence that the map of terror in the Middle East and Central Asia is practically interchangeable with the map of oil. There's Infinite Justice, Enduring Freedom - and Everlasting Profits to be made: not only by the American industrial-military complex, but especially by American and European oil giants.

Where is the realm these days of former US secretary of state James Baker, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, former White House chief of staff John Sununu and former defense secretary and current Invisible Man Dick Cheney? They are all happily dreaming of, and working for, the establishment of Pipelineistan.

Pipelineistan is the golden future: a paradise of opportunity in the form of US$5 trillion of oil and gas in the Caspian basin and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. In Washington's global petrostrategy, this is supposed to be the end of America's oil dependence on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). This is of course the heart of the matter in the New Great Game - compared to which the original 19th-century Great Game between czarist Russia and the British Empire was a childish tin soldier's diversion.

Afghanistan itself has some natural gas in the north of the country, near Turkmenistan. But above all it is ultra-strategic: positioned between the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia, between Turkmenistan and the avid markets of the Indian subcontinent, China and Japan. Afghanistan is at the core of Pipelineistan.

The Caspian states hold at least 200 billion barrels of oil, and Central Asia has 6.6 trillion cubic meters of natural gas just begging to be exploited. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are two major producers: Turkmenistan is nothing less than a "gas republic". Apart from oil and gas there's copper, coal, tungsten, zinc, iron, uranium, gold.

The only export routes, for the moment, are through Russia. So most of the game consists of building alternative pipelines to Turkey and Western Europe, and to the east toward the Asian markets. India will be a key player. India, Iran, Russia and Israel are all planning to supply oil and gas to South and Southeast Asia through India.

It's enlightening to note that all countries or regions which happen to be an impediment to Pipelineistan routes towards the West have been subjected either to a direct interference or to all-out war: Chechnya, Georgia, Kurdistan, Yugoslavia and Macedonia. To the east, the key problems are the Uighurs of China's far-western Xinjiang and, until recently, Afghanistan.

More, much more than Afghanistan is involved. What's at stake is Eurasia. Zbigniew Brzezinski, stellar hawk and Jimmy Carter's former national security adviser, used to wax lyrical on Eurasia: "Seventy-five percent of the world population, most of its material riches, 60 percent of the world's GNP, 75 percent of sources of energy, and behind the US, the six most prosperous economies and the six largest military budgets." Brzezinski is on record stressing that the US would have to make sure "no other power would take possession of this geopolitical space".

The numbers are clear. According to the United States Energy Information Administration, in 2001 America imported an average of 9.1 million barrels per day - over 60 percent of its crude oil needs. In 2020, the country is projected to require almost 26 million barrels per day in imports. So Pipelineistan, in the Caucasus and in Central Asia - for the West and Japan but especially for America itself - cannot but be the strategic-military No 1 goal.

In this geostrategic grand design, the Taliban were the proverbial fly in the ointment. The Afghan War was decided long before September 11. September 11 merely precipitated events. Plans to destroy the Taliban had been the subject of international diplomatic and not-so-diplomatic discussions for months before September 11. There was a crucial meeting in Geneva in May 2001 between US State Department, Iranian, German and Italian officials, where the main topic was a strategy to topple the Taliban and replace the theocracy with a "broad-based government". The topic was raised again in full force at the Group of Eight (G-8) summit in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001 when India - an observer at the summit - also contributed its own plans.

Nor concidentally, Pipelineistan was the central topic in secret negotiations in a Berlin hotel a few days after the G-8 summit, between American, Russian, German and Pakistani officials. And Pakistani high officials, on condition of anonymity, have extensively described a plan set up by the end of July 2001 by American advisers, consisting of military strikes against the Taliban from bases in Tajikistan, to be launched before mid-October.

More recently, while most of the planet that has access to news was distracted by New Year's Eve celebrations, and only nine days after Hamid Karzai's interim government took power in Kabul, Bush II appointed his special envoy to Afghanistan. It comes as no surprise he is Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad - a former aide to the Californian energy giant UNOCAL. Khalilzad wasted no time in boarding the first flight to Central Asia. The Bush II team now does not even try to disguise that the whole game is about oil. The so-called brand-new American "Afghan policy" is being conducted by people intimately connected to oil industry interests in Central Asia.

In 1997, UNOCAL led an international consortium - Centgas - that reached a memorandum of understanding to build a $2 billion, 1,275-kilometer-long, 1.5-meter-wide natural-gas pipeline from Dauletabad in southern Turkmenistan to Karachi in Pakistan, via the Afghan cities of Herat and Kandahar, crossing into Pakistan near Quetta. A $600 million extension to India was also being considered. The dealings with the Taliban were facilitated by the Clinton administration and the Pakistani Inter Services Agency (ISI). But the civil war in Afghanistan would simply not go away. UNOCAL had to pull out.

American energy conglomerates, through the American Overseas Private Investment Corp (OPIC), are now resuscitating this and other projects. Already last October, the UNOCAL-led project was discussed in Islamabad between Pakistani Petroleum Minister Usman Aminuddin and American Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain. The exuberant official statement reads: "The pipeline opens up new avenues of multi-dimensional regional cooperation, particularly in view of the recent geopolitical developments in the region."

But there are practical problems with these "new avenues". Specialists at the James Baker (who else?) Institute in Texas stress that the main beneficiaries would be Turkmenistan and Afghanistan - which in itself is not a bad idea: Afghanistan would make a little money and perhaps be a little more stable. As far as the gas is concerned - liquefied and exported from Karachi - it would be too expensive compared with gas from the Middle East.

UNOCAL also has a project to build the so-called Central Asian Oil Pipeline, almost 1,700km long, linking Chardzhou in Turkmenistan to Russian's existing Siberian oil pipelines and also to the Pakistani Arabian Sea coast. This pipeline will carry 1 million barrels of oil a day from different areas of former Soviet republics, and it will run parallel to the gas pipeline route through Afghanistan.

Khalilzad is a very interesting character indeed. He was always a huge Taliban supporter. Four years ago, he wrote in the Washington Post that "the Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran". Khalilzad only abandoned the Taliban after Bill Clinton fired 58 cruise missiles into Afghanistan in August 1998, in retaliation for the alleged involvement of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Only one day after the attack, UNOCAL put Centgas on hold - and two months later abandoned plans for the trans-Afghan pipeline.

A little more than a year ago, Khalilzad was reincarnated in print in The Washington Quarterly, now stressing his four mains reason to ged rid of the Taliban regime as soon as possible: Osama bin Laden, opium trafficking, oppression of the Afghan people and, last but not least, oil.

Afghan diaspora sources in Paris acidly comment that Khalilzad will be regarded as nothing less than a traitor by fiercely proud and independent Afghans. Born in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1951, he is part of the Afghan ruling elite. His father was an aide to King Zahir Shah. Khalilzad was studying at the notoriously conservative University of Chicago when Afghanistan was invaded by the Red Army in December 1979.

Later he became an American citizen and a special adviser to the State Department during the Reagan years. He was a strident lobbyist for more US military aid to the mujahedeen during the anti-USSR jihad - campaigning for widespread distribution of Stinger missiles.

Khalilzad was undersecretary of defense for Bush I, during the war against Iraq. After a stint at the Rand Corp think tank, he headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Defense Department and advised Donald Rumsfeld. But he was not rewarded with any promotions. The required Senate confirmation would raise extremely uncomfortable questions about his role as UNOCAL adviser and staunch Taliban defender. He was assigned instead to the National Security Council - no Senate confirmation required - where he reports to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Rice herself is a former oil-company consultant. During Bush I, from 1989-92, she was on the board of directors of Chevron, and was its main expert on Kazakhstan. Chevron has invested more than $20 billion in Kazakhstan alone. As for The Invisible Man, Vice President Dick Cheney, he was for five years a director of Halliburton, one of the top companies rendering service to the oil industry: present in 130 countries, 100,000 employees, turnover of almost $20 billion, a member of the Fortune 400. Cheney did a lot of business with the murderous Myanmar dictatorship, and invested heavily in Nigeria.

Both Cheney and Bush II spent an important part of their careers in Arbusto, a small company directed by Cheney. Arbusto never made money, but was handsomely supported by very wealthy Saudis. Among the shareholders there was one James Bath, very cozy with Bush I and chief money launderer for shady Gulf superstars, including one Salem bin Laden, one of the 17 brothers of Osama bin Laden.

All American secretaries of state since World War II have been connected with the oil industry - except two: one of them is Colin Powell, but in his case the president, vice president and national security adviser are all part of the oil industry anyway.

So everybody in the ruling plutocracy knows the rules of the ruthless game: Central Asia is crucial to Washington's worldwide petro-strategy. So is a "friendly" government in Afghanistan - now led by the always impeccably dressed and fluent English speaker Hamid Karzai. It does not matter that independent minds from Central Asia in exile in Europe unanimously ridicule Karzai as nothing else than a Taliban himself, and his Northern Alliance ministers as a bunch of crooks.

As for US corporate-controlled media - from TV networks to daily newspapers - they just exercise self-censorship and remain mute about all of these connections.

http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/DA25Ag01.html

 

Pipelineistan, Part 2 - The Games Nations Play

Pipelineistan, Part 2 - The Games Nations Play
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

Two months ago, the White House was deliriously happy with the official opening of the first new pipeline of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium - a joint venture including Russia, Kazakhstan, Oman, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil and a bunch of other minor players.

This $2.65 billion pipeline links the enormous Tengiz oilfield in northwestern Kazakhstan to the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea: from there, the sky - ie the world market - is the limit. Bush II, according to the White House, is developing "a network of multiple Caspian pipelines that also include the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Baku-Supsa, and Baku-Novorossiyisk oil pipelines, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline". So one of the key nodes in the American petrostrategy is composed by Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey.

The pipeline consortium for Baku-Ceyhan, led by British Petroleum, is represented by the law firm Baker & Botts. The principal attorney is none other than Texan superstar James Baker - secretary of state under Bush I and chief spokesman for the Bush II 2000 campaign when all gloves were off to shut down the Florida vote recount.

Texas-based, scandal-prone Enron, together with Amoco, Chevron, Mobil, UNOCAL and British Petroleum, were all spending billions of dollars to pump the reserves of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Baker, Scowcroft, Sununu and Cheney have all closed major deals directly and indirectly on behalf of the oil companies. But now the Enron scandal has just exploded right in the face of the oil industry - and Bush II's administration. It will be very enlightening to see what the American tradition of investigative journalism will make of all this.

Enron once had a market value of $70 billion. It filed for bankruptcy in December 2001 after admitting it ovestated its profits by almost $600 million. Paul Krugman wrote that "Enron helped Dick Cheney devise an energy plan that certainly looks as if it was written by and for the companies that advised his task force". The Enron big-time crooks - close pals of Cheney and Bush II - dwarf any Asian "crony capitalists" Americans were carping about before and after the Asian financial crisis.

There's no shortage of crooks in the oil industry. Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan have intimate relations with Israeli military intelligence. A so-called "former" Israeli intelligence agent, Yousef Maiman, president of the Mehrav Group of Israel, is nothing less than "Special Ambassador", official negotiatior and even policymaker responsible for developing the enormous energy resources of Turkmenistan.

Maiman is a citizen of the gas republic by presidential decree - signed by the Turkmenbashi himself, the fabulously megalomaniac Saparmurad Niazov, former member of the Soviet Politburo. Maiman, according to the Wall Street Journal, is actively involved in advancing the "geopolitical goals of both the US and Israel" in Central Asia. He certainly does not beat around the bush: "Controlling the transport route is controlling the product." Nobody knows where Mehrav's money comes from.

Mehrav's planned pipelines bypass both Iran and Russia. But after the conquest of Afghanistan, oil sources in Singapore say Mehrav may consider dealing with Iran. It's all to do with the importance of the Turkish market. Russia and Turkmenistan are fiercely competing to conquer the Turkish gas market. Considering the strategic relationship between Turkey and Israel, the Israeli game remains preventing Turkish strategic dependence on Iran. Turkey is a NATO member and a key US ally. The US and Britain routinely strike against Iraq from Turkish bases - from which they patrol the unillateraly-declared Iraqi "no-fly zones". These "no-fly zones" are obviously not sanctioned by the UN.

Mehrav is also involved in a murderous project to reduce the flow of water to Iraq by diverting water from the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers to southeastern Turkey. And Magal Security Systems, an Israeli company, is also involved with Turkey: it will provide security for the 2,000 km-long oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

Crook-infested Enron - the biggest donor to the Bush campaign of 2000 - was ubiquitious: it conducted the feasibility study for the $2.5 billion trans-Caspian pipeline being built under a joint venture signed almost three years ago between Turkmenistan and Bechtel and General Electric. The go-between in the deal was none other than the Mehrav Group. Chairman Maiman spent a fortune hiring the Washington lobbying firm Cassidy and Associates to seduce official Washington with the trans-Caspian pipeline project.

The intrincate relationship between Israel, Turkey and the US means that as much as the trans-Caspian pipeline, the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline is also absolutely crucial. It could be extended to bring oil directly to thirsty Israel. During the Clinton years, oil giants were under tremendous pressure to build East-West pipelines. But all of them preferred to build North-South pipelines - much cheaper, but with the inconvenience of crossing Iran, an absolute anathema for Washington.

Russia already has a contract with Turkmenistan to purchase 30 billion cubic meters of gas a year. This represents a big blow to the US field of dreams, the trans-Caspian gas pipeline. This also means that Russia will never let go of its sphere of influence without a tremendous fight. The Central Asian republics are on its borders, Russia has dominated them for centuries and they are home to millions of Russians. Russian is still the language they all use to do business with each other.

Thanks to master political chess player Vladimir Putin, Russia is now on the cosiest terms possible with Washington - and US-Iran antipathy is apparently receding. Russia may eventually become a partner in at least some of Washington's petrostrategy games in Central Asia - like the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. The regional map also reveals that Iran, besides holding important gas reserves, offers the best direct access from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, where oil and gas can be quickly exported to Asian markets.

Iran assumes, not entirely without reason, that it is the rightful guardian of Central Asia because of centuries of ethnic, historical, linguistic and religious ties. And Iran is very conscious that American military links and now physical presence in Central Asia are part of a strategy to encircle it. But even amid so many geopolitical and ideological pitfalls, the fact remains that as long as the US is militarily involved in Afghanistan, there will be some sort of US-Iranian diplomatic engagement.

Under the control of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), pipelines from Central Asia will also reach China's Xinjiang. Oil sources in Singapore stress that this will certainly spell a slump for the sea routes across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Washington is more than aware through its think tanks of the consequences: an extremely likely strategic realignment between China, Japan and Korea.

The Chinese have their sights on only one terrifying prospect: the encirclement of China by the US. UNOCAL is dreaming about profits. Washington is thinking about the robust Chinese economy. Whatever "war against terror" distractions, China remains the key strategic competitor to the US in the 21st century. With Afghanistan in the bag, UNOCAL dreams of monster profits in the Asian market - much higher than in Europe - while Washington closely monitors the Chinese economy: growth of 8 percent in 2000, 7 percent in 2001, and needing all the oil and gas it can get. Chinese strategists are working around the clock to develop local forms of energy production.

What happens next will be closely linked to the deliberations of the Shanghai Five, now Shanghai Six, or more burocratically, the Shangahi Cooperation Organization (SCO): China and Russia, plus four Central Asian republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Takijistan and Uzbekistan). Manouvering with extreme care, China is using the SCO to align Russia economically and politically towards China and northeast Asia. At the same time, Russia is using the SCO to maintain its traditional hegemony in Central Asia. The name of the game for solidifying the alliance is Russian export of its enormous reserves of oil and gas.

Since the NATO war against Yugoslavia and the de facto occupation of Kosovo - where America built its largest military base since the Vietnam War - China and Russia have their minds set on Chechnya and Muslim Xinjiang. For the moment, at least, America has absolutely no way of interfering in these domestic problems, since China and especially Russia are endorsing the war against terrorism.

The Taliban were never a target in the "war against terrorism". They were just a scapegoat - rather, a horde of medieval warrior scapegoats who simply did not fulfill their contract: to insert Aghanistan into Pipelineistan. All the regional players now know America is in Central Asia to stay, as Washington itself has been stridently repeating these last few weeks, and it will be influencing or disturbing the economy and geopolitics of the region. The wider world is absolutely oblivious to these real stakes in the New Great Game.

The US at the time of the Gulf War did not show any interest in replacing "Satan" Hussein. That would seriously compromise the American design to establish bases on the Arabian peninsula on the convenient pretext of helping poor Arab sheikhs against the Iraqi Evil Monster. More than a decade later, Satan Hussein is still there, Bush I is now Bush II, and assorted Pentagon hawks are still fuming, trying to fabricate any excuse to blow Saddam back to Mesopotamian ashes. But Saddam will not be attacked, because Saddam is the ultimate reason for American military bases in the Gulf - a splendid affair because on top of it all it is a free ride, the expenses being paid by the ultra-flush sheikdoms. Now, after the (also unfinished) New Afghan War, American forces are already establishing themselves in Central and South Asia to once again "protect the interests of the free world".

It is never enough to remember that after the end of the communist regime in Afghanistan, the American strategy was to deliberately let Islamic extremism go wild - a perfect way to scare the unstable regimes in the Central Asian neo-republics. Islamic fundamentalism has always been a key card in the American strategic design since the Cold War days when the CIA subcontracted to the Pakistani ISI the arm-them-to-their-teeth policy regarding the mujahideen. It is always easy to forget that the good-guys-turned-bad-guys were once were hailed by Ronnie Reagan himself at the Oval Office as "the moral equivalent of the founding fathers". America has been trying hard to "get" Afghanistan - the heart of Asia in Antiquity, the Pipelineistan crossroads of Asia nowadays - for more than 20 years. In the process, the mujahideen transformed Afghanistan, with CIA blessing, into the world's leading producer of heroin, opening the crucial and ultra-profitable drug pipeline Afghanistan-Turkey-Balkans-Western Europe. More than a martini, oil-arms-drugs is the classic CIA cocktail. This "Drugistan" road has just been spetacularly reopened after the fall of the Taliban.

Pipelineistan is not an end in itself. Oil and gas by themselves are not the US's ultimate aim. It's all about control. In Monopoly, Belgian writer Michel Collon wrote: "If you want to rule the world, you need to control oil. All the oil. Anywhere." If the US controls the sources of energy of its rivals - Europe, Japan, China and other nations aspiring to be more independent - they win. This explains why pipelines from the Caucasus to the West have to be America-friendly - ie Turkish or Macedonian - and not "unreliable", meaning Russian-controled. Washington, always, has to control everything: that's what Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger always said. The same goes for the military bases in Saudi Arabia, and now in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

There's no business like war business. Thanks to war against Iraq, the US has its military bases in the Persian Gulf. Thanks to war against Yugoslavia, the US has its military bases in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia. Thanks to war against the Taliban, the US is now in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not to mention the base in Incirlik, Turkey. The US is also in the Caucasus - in Georgia and Azerbaijan. Iran, China and Russia are practically encircled. There's no business like show business. Raise the curtains. Enter Pipelineistan. (Applause).

http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/DA26Ag01.html

 

hehe another "i cant believe they said something off topic" dudes,,,and apparently doesnt read or write the same way people have conversations.
i thought forums where "conversations" carried out by typing,,,am i off topic again?
isnt it off topic for your first sentence to be about off tpoic?,,,im just confusing myself now,,hehe
and i'd like to read brians post,,,but theres too much cut-n-pasting,,maybe should have just gave the link to the page

 

Dear 1much,
From your numerous postings and illiterate ramblings I just assumed you were not intelligent enough, nor inquisitive enough, to push the link button...so I thought the subject warranted a repeat in writing.

 

equals,,, you cant read,,,and from your illiterate pasting,,i can see how VERY intelligent you are,,,,and is your last post on topic? hehe

 

Brian your uncalled for and condecending attitude towards the1much could be considered extremely bad taste following your 'monotologue' above. Whilst extremely relevant to life in general and your life in particular let us not get away from the main reason for the existance of these Forums - this particular one is in fact entitled "Boat Design" yet not once in the complete diatribe did you mention the word boat (or any other waterbourne vehicle)!

Whilst not wishing to teach you how to 'suck eggs' as it were, I do not visit this end of the forum very often (you might like to hazard a guess why), I would expect that 'they that do' would be treated in a slightly more gentlemanly manner than to be told, more or less 'your an idiot'. I would also hope (but not expect) that posters might stay more or less within the boundaries of the forums - but no do not repair to the 'Drivel Thread' that is not for the likes of this either. Thank you and good bye.

 

A Crude Case For War?

By Steven Mufson
Sunday, March 16, 2008; B01
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/14/AR2008031403677.html



It's hard to miss the point of the "Blood for Oil" Web site. It features one poster of an American flag with "Blood for oil?" in white block letters where the stars should be and two dripping red handprints across the stripes. Another shows a photo of President Bush with a thin black line on his upper lip. "Got oil?" the headline asks wryly.

Five years after the United States invaded Iraq, plenty of people believe that the war was waged chiefly to secure U.S. petroleum supplies and to make Iraq safe -- and lucrative -- for the U.S. oil industry.

We may not know the real motivations behind the Iraq war for years, but it remains difficult to distill oil from all the possibilities. That's because our society and economy have been nursed on cheap oil, and the idea that oil security is a right as well as a necessity has become part of our foreign policy DNA, handed down from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to George H.W. Bush. And the war and its untidy aftermath have, in fact, swelled the coffers of the world's biggest oil companies.

But it hasn't happened in the way anyone might have imagined.

Instead of making Iraq an open economy fueled by a thriving oil sector, the war has failed to boost the flow of oil from Iraq's giant well-mapped reservoirs, which oil experts say could rival Saudi Arabia's and produce 6 million barrels a day, if not more. Thanks to insurgents' sabotage of pipelines and pumping stations, and foreign companies' fears about safety and contract risks in Iraq, the country is still struggling in vain to raise oil output to its prewar levels of about 2.5 million barrels a day.

As it turns out, that has kept oil off the international market at just the moment when the world desperately needs a cushion of supplies to keep prices down. Demand from China is booming, and political strife has limited oil production in Nigeria and Venezuela.

In the absence of Iraqi supplies, prices have soared three-and-a-half-fold since the U.S. invasion on March 20, 2003. (Last week, they shattered all previous records, even after adjusting for inflation.) The profits of the five biggest Western oil companies have jumped from $40 billion to $121 billion over the same period. While the United States has rid itself of Saddam Hussein and whatever threat he might have posed, oil revenues have filled the treasuries of petro-autocrats in Iran, Venezuela and Russia, emboldening those regimes and complicating U.S. diplomacy in new ways.

American consumers are paying for this turmoil at the pump. If the overthrow of Hussein was supposed to be a silver bullet for the American consumer, it turned out to be one that ricocheted and tore a hole through his wallet.

"If we went to war for oil, we did it as clumsily as anyone could do. And we spent more on the war than we could ever conceivably have gotten out of Iraq's oil fields even if we had particular control over them," says Anthony Cordesman, an expert on U.S. strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who rejects the idea that the war was designed on behalf of oil companies.

But that doesn't mean that oil had nothing to do with the invasion. In his recent memoir, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil."

Says Cordesman: "To say that we would have taken the same steps against a dictator in Africa or Burma as we took in Iraq is to ignore the strategic realities that drove American behavior."

****

There is no single conspiracy theory about why the Bush administration allegedly waged this "war for oil." Here are two.

Version one: Bush, former Texas oilman, and Vice President Cheney, former chief executive of the contracting and oil-services firm Halliburton, wanted to help their friends in the oil world. They sought to install a pro-Western government that would invite the major oil companies back into Iraq. "Exxon was in the kitchen with Dick Cheney when the Iraq war was being cooked up," says the Web site of a group called Consumers for Peace.

Version two: As laid out in an April 2003 article in Le Monde Diplomatique, "The war against Saddam is about guaranteeing American hegemony rather than about increasing the profits of Exxon." Yahya Sadowski, an associate professor at the American University of Beirut, argues that "the neo-conservative cabal" had a "grand plan" to ramp up Iraqi production, "flood the world market with Iraqi oil" and drive the price down to $15 a barrel. That would stimulate the U.S. economy, "finally destroy" OPEC, wreck the economies of "rogue states" such as Iran and Venezuela, and "create more opportunities for 'regime change.' "

There are historical roots for all this suspicion. After World War I, the Western powers carved up oil-producing interests in the Middle East. In Iraq, the French were given about a quarter of the national consortium, and the U.S. government pressured its allies to turn over an equal share to a handful of American companies.

Even now, the fate of Iraq's concessions is laden with politics. Russia's Lukoil hopes to regain access to a giant field. China is seeking new fields. The big U.S. firms are angling to return to fields they ran before sanctions barred them during the 1990s. Smaller U.S., Turkish, European and Korean firms are gambling on new exploration deals with the autonomous Kurdish regional authority despite threats from Baghdad.

"One can imagine Iraq's oil fields as a pimple waiting to be pricked," says Antonia Juhasz, author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time." She notes that the Bush administration put former oil executives on the reconstruction team, hired the Virginia consulting firm BearingPoint to write a framework for Iraq's oil industry, picked the Iraqis who took key oil ministry posts and has pressured Iraq to adopt a petroleum law favorable to international companies.

The petroleum law has become a rallying point for critics who say that the war was about oil. It would allow long-term production-sharing agreements, which Juhasz says are only used in 12 percent of the world "and only where the country needs to entice the companies to come." Defenders of the law, including exiled Iraqi oil experts, say that it provides for different types of contracts; how generous they are will depend on how well they are negotiated, but the law sets minimum conditions.

Greg Muttitt, another widely quoted war critic, who works for Platform London, a group of British environmentalists, human rights campaigners, artists and activists, says that an occupied country can't negotiate freely. What ended up in the proposed petroleum law, he says, was "pretty close" to what was in papers drafted by the State Department before the invasion. "Perhaps not surprising," he adds, given lobbying by U.S. officials and the role of former oil company executives in the reconstruction hierarchy.

That's the theory. The problem is: The petroleum law has not been adopted.

****

The idea that the Bush administration was in the tank for the oil industry glosses over a story of conflicting views before the U.S. invasion and the bungled execution of plans afterwards. There were two rival interagency policy groups before the war, one led by the Pentagon and one by the State Department. Some key differences were never resolved. Some Pentagon planners wanted Iraq to maximize oil output, while State worried that a flood of Iraqi oil could threaten Saudi interests and market share.

The notion of an oil war also conjures up an image of a swashbuckling, string-pulling oil industry that no longer reflects a business that in many ways has become cautious and fearful of political turmoil. Western oil interests did encourage the overthrow of Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh in the early 1950s and the war in Suez in 1956. But generally oil companies are content to forge alliances of convenience with leaders as diverse as Saudi kings, Angolan communists and Indonesia's late, long-time autocrat Suharto as long as they're predictable. On those leaders' politics, human rights record, ethnicity or religion, oil giants are agnostic.

"Companies don't like and won't make investments where there's uncertainty, and war is the biggest uncertainty of all," said Rob McKee, the former number two executive at ConocoPhillips and a former top U.S. official overseeing Iraq's oil sector. "On the other hand, companies were hoping that Iraq would open up, and as long as Saddam was there, Iraq couldn't. . . . From that point of view, maybe they were happy that there would be a change."

Still, the big firms had trepidations. In a conversation with an adviser shortly before the invasion, the chief executive of one of the five major oil companies described what he would say if asked to invest billions of dollars in Iraq after the war: Tell me about the contract system, arbitration, physical security and social cohesion, then we'll decide.

Five years later, they still haven't decided, and physical security is so tenuous that the oil giants are still declining Iraqi invitations to send their employees to inspect existing fields.

This wasn't what Bush administration planners had expected.

Leading administration officials expected a postwar Iraq to reclaim its former position among oil exporters. "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon," then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress just after the invasion, predicting that oil would generate $50 billion to $100 billion in revenues within two to three years. Ironically, Iraq might approach that figure this year because of high prices, not higher production.

Prewar planning settled who would oversee Iraq's oil sector. The Pentagon picked Phil Carroll, a well-respected former top executive at Royal Dutch Shell, who was succeeded by McKee. War critics point to such industry ties as evidence of nefarious influence, but former administration members say the choices were made on the basis of expertise. "If you wanted to get someone to help run an oil industry, who would you choose?" asked one person involved in selecting Carroll. "A broker on an exchange? An environmental expert? Or the head of an oil company?"

****

The controversial details were all part of the larger strategic picture. "When we first decided on the war, I don't remember oil playing an important part," says Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser under the elder Bush and a critic of the current president's decision to invade.

But that's because concern about oil supplies is part of the architecture of U.S. foreign policy. Scowcroft notes that oil can't be disregarded because Iraq and its neighbors sit on two-thirds of the world's oil reserves. But oil needn't be mentioned either because it's self-evident. War critics might call that the perfect conspiracy.

In a sense, though, all Americans are part of that conspiracy. We have built a society that is profligate with its energy and relies on petroleum that happens to be pooled under some unstable or unfriendly regimes. We have frittered away energy resources with little regard for the strategic consequences. And now it's hard and expensive to change our ways.

Zaab Sethna, a business consultant and former official of the Iraqi National Congress, says that he attended many Pentagon and State Department meetings and never heard postwar oil policy discussed.

But, he says, "Let's not kid ourselves. Iraq is sitting on a very large portion of oil itself and is in a key region of the world. And that makes it important for U.S. security interests. . . . The Iraqi opposition . . . realized that Rwanda wouldn't be getting the attention of the superpower."

Until Rwanda discovers oil.


mufsons@washpost.com


Steven Mufson covers energy for The Washigton Post.

 

I will apologize for my outburst 1much.

I am just extemely upset with my country's behavor over these last 7 years under George Bush and his reckless band of theives, and where he has led our country both economically and in world opinion of us.

 

no problem,,,hehe,,im used to it,,and it really doesnt bother me,,usually,,we learn alot by what others call "arguing" i call just a "living room of friends conversation" hehe,,i always call my friends "a little (some alot) simple" hehe
and i seem to ALWAYS be learning hehe
and Thanks Walrusy