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Americans fight to get Iraqi oil on line

A US soldier stands guard at an oil field near an Iraqi oil hub in Kirkuk on Friday. PHOTO: REUTERS

In southern Iraq, oil well fires have been extinguished, looted equipment is being recovered, and US officials are optimistic that the oil fields could be producing 1.1 million barrels a day within seven weeks.

In the north, however, more widespread looting of oil facilities has put any prospect of a quick recovery in doubt. The offices, facilities and homes have been so thoroughly ransacked that employees don't see how they can get oil flowing again soon.

"We cannot get all the workers to come to work now because we have no place to put them," said Adil Qazas, a geologist and top Northern Oil Company official. "We have no offices."

In the south, military experts have been clearing mines and explosives, and engineers and other officials are trying to get the oil fields back into operation.

Damage to the southern oil fields in the fighting was comparatively light. Military planners, aware that Saddam Hussein's retreating army set 700 oil wells afire in Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War, made sure that US coalition troops entering Iraq from the south took control of the Rumailah oil field before Iraqi troops could blow the wells.

Damage control * The Iraqis managed to set fire to a half-dozen wells. * The last two fires were extinguished this week. * Six large gas-oil separation plants in the Rumailah fields were taken by US-led forces with minimal damage.

"We were really fortunate," said Tom Logsdon, the program manager to restore Iraqi oil production under the US-led interim administration led by retired General Jay Garner.

"We didn't have near as much damage as we thought we would," Logsdon said in an interview Thursday. "The Marines did a lot of training on capturing the infrastructure. They went in so fast the Iraqis didn't have time to sabotage."

The Iraqis managed to set fire to a half-dozen wells. The last two were extinguished this week by Kuwaiti firefighters and the Texas firm of Boots & Coots International Well Control

Six large gas-oil separation plants in the Rumailah fields were taken by US-led forces with minimal damage. The plants, which separate natural gas from crude oil, could have taken a year to replace if destroyed.

Logsdon said the first separation plant could be back into operation in about six weeks, which would allow 450,000 barrels a day to flow daily, and the others could be opened up in the subsequent week, bringing the total daily output from the south to 1.1 million barrels, just short of half of Iraq's total daily output of 2.8 million barrels before the recent war began.

"We're going through all these systems now to determine what degree of battle damage or sabotage was done and then get it opened up," Logsdon said.

Iraq has the second-largest reserves after Saudi Arabia, but Iraq's exports represent only 3 percent of global production because the oil infrastructure has been badly run down by decades of war and sanctions. Daily production reached 3.5 million barrels in 1980 -- the outset of the ruinous war against Iran.

Bringing another dozen, smaller plants back into production in the rest of the Rumailah fields and in Iraq's northern oil region around Kirkuk and Mosul would increase the total output. Logsdon declined to give a production estimate or timeline.

In the pleasant, green suburb of Kirkuk, alongside some of the world's most productive oil fields, geologists, engineers and other petroleum industry workers are working to put the now-dormant oil fields back in production.

With 430 wells over roughly 470km, Baba Gur Gur -- discovered in 1927 -- is one of the largest oil fields in the world. Before the war, it produced 600,000 barrels a day. Many experts say it could produce more.

"There are few fields in the world which can produce that much," said Abdul Wahab, a geologist and a local expert on the region's history. "The Kirkuk field is one of the greatest, one of the giant fields of the world, not only of the Middle East."

When Baghdad's authority collapsed, Kurdish guerrilla fighters, called peshmerga, seized the processing plant and the fields before transferring power to American soldiers. The soldiers now patrols the area and guards some of the facilities. The engineers, scientists, cleaners, security guards and typists who ran Northern Oil's day-to-day operations remain, and many were expected to show up for work Saturday.
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