Anti-Neocons Forum

You don't see the US attack Saudi Arabia who has the most oil

The elephant, of course, is Iraq and the fistful of deals it has finalized over the last few months with some of the world’s largest oil companies.

Iraq anticipates that these deals will boost output over the next seven years from the current level of 2.4 million barrels per day (bpd) to something between 10 million or 12 million bpd. Along the way, Iraq would zoom past its meddlesome neighbor and rival Iran as the No. 2 producer in OPEC (4.1 million bpd) and eventually challenge the Saudis, currently producing about 10 million bpd, for the No. 1 spot.

If all of that happens — a very big “if” given the uncertain state of affairs in Iraq — it would not only upend the pecking order in OPEC, it also would cast the region’s geopolitical balance in an entirely new light.

“Iraq is a problem for everybody,” said Giacomo Luciani, an oil industry scholar with the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. “But at the moment, this is all very speculative. We don’t know what demand will be in five years, 10 years, and we don’t know to what extent Iraqi production will increase.”

For its part, Iraq has been sending very mixed signals. On the one hand, there is all the talk of quadrupling production in seven years; but in March, ahead of OPEC’s most recent gathering in Vienna, Iraq’s Oil Minister Hussain Shahristani said Baghdad would be willing to discuss production quotas with its OPEC brethren once its own production hit the 4 million bpd level.

One of OPEC’s founding members, Iraq has been excused from the organization’s quota regime for many years. That’s because it has yet to recover from the sharp drop in production that followed the Iraq-Iran War and continued through two more wars and a decade of sanctions.

Historically, OPEC has set quotas for Iraq and Iran at approximately the same level — this based on their proven reserves. But Iraq now believes it should be treated as an equal to Saudi Arabia.

Even if its oil output is surpassed by Iraq, Iran would remain the dominant political and military power in the Gulf. But being out-pumped by Iraq is likely to make Tehran feel an even greater urgency to develop its nuclear capability in order to maintain its status.

The key player may turn out to be China, the world’s No. 2 energy importer. The Chinese are heavily dependent on Iranian oil and, as a result, Beijing for years has tried to shield Tehran as much as possible from the economic sanctions the U.S. and its allies would impose.

But that is changing. Now that the China National Petroleum Corporation has signed a major deal with Iraq, Beijing is signaling a new willingness to consider sanctions. And with the encouragement of the Obama administration, Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil producers are giving the Chinese quiet assurances that they will cover any decline in Iranian production resulting from sanctions.

All of this is bad news for the government in Iran, where any drop in oil revenue will make it increasingly difficult for an unpopular regime to hold on to power.

Ry wrote:yeah except we didn't get Iraq's oil china did and the per-invasion lies to start the war came from an Israeli cabal not oil companies. It was cheaper to buy it than to steal it. We went to war for Israel plain and simple that a lot of countries in the middle east have oil is a consequence of geography, we are fighting them because they are Israel's enemies. You don't see the US attack Saudi Arabia who has the most oil, or Qatar or Jordan etc because they are all Israel's allies. You see the US only hitting Israeli enemies. Libya as well, the US did not get oil out of that either but bombed them anyway for the second time.

Ry wrote:no because they made oil prices rise the exact opposite of cheaper oil and that was a very predictable consequence of knocking iraq off line. it happened in the first gulf war.